THE MULTIPLE SUS

Abstract

This article focuses on analyzing the indeterminacies and incompleteness of The Multiple SUS, which appear in speeches, images, events, feelings, and experiences — a SUS in motion, a living SUS. The idea of multiples, which conceives of a SUS made up of parts, with contextual variations, serves as a methodological resource for the analytical challenge of ethnographically analyzing the public health system. Thus, it focuses on a disaggregated SUS, its mode of dissolution, where erasure becomes important. To achieve this, one must seek the image that exists outside of context, the user who carries their perspective, and the ideas and memories told about a SUS yet to be lived. It is from these perspectives, continuities, contradictions, and incompleteness that one hopes to describe the SUS. Furthermore, in this case, there is no fixed point of comparison. The ethnography took place between 2020 and 2023, during the pandemic, at the Health Department of the municipality of Juiz de Fora, Minas Gerais, with managers and technicians from the Unified Health System (SUS, as in Portuguese) as interlocutors. Other observation sites comprise the ethnographic thread—the Parque das Torres neighborhood and the local Primary Health Care service. The author also emphasizes his experience as a community health worker between 2003 and 2009, which intertwines with the ethnography.