Speech, Language and Hearing Sciences in the SUS in São Paulo state

Abstract

The SUS is an achievement of the Brazilian people and has brought a new paradigm of health, changing focus from the disease to the subject and its context, which led to reorganization of the health system and reflection on the training of professionals in the area. The Speech, Language and Hearing Sciences is in process of identifying construction to act in the public health system, since it is a profession with recent regulation, around 30 years, still expanding. In this way, it is important discussing about professional sizing within Brazilian Unified Health System. The São Paulo state concentrates the largest number of Speech, Language and Hearing professionals and undergraduate courses. In this panorama, the interest arises in researching the distribution of those professionals in the SUS of the São Paulo state to understand the inclusion of this category in the public health service. Secondary data were analyzed from the public information banks of the Brazilian Ministry of Health and Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics regarding the size of the cities in São Paulo and the number of Speech, Language and Hearing professionals working in SUS in each of them. It is possible to observe that there is no logical in professional distribution, with an inversely proportional relation between the size of the cities and the number of professionals working in the public health system. The professional sizing can be an important instrument for improving the organization of those professionals’s offer to population.