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Bahiana hosts the Brazilian Symposium on Occupational Health
Meeting brought together big names in occupational health in Brazil.
05/12/2017
"We are hosting this event with great joy, for various reasons, mainly because it is a space of resistance. And it is important that we are together to discuss and defend the health of workers who are being violently attacked. We have to be together. to resist these setbacks that we are experiencing". With these words, the dean of Escola Bahiana de Medicina e Saúde Pública, Dr. Maria Luisa Carvalho Soliani officially opened the Brazilian Symposium on Occupational Health which took place on the 24th and 25th of November, at the Cabula Academic Unit.
In addition to the dean, the opening table included the coordinator of the Nursing course and the research line in Work Management (Gestra), Cristiane Magali Freitas dos Santos; representing the Directorate of Surveillance and Attention to Occupational Health (Divast), the labor nurse Ely Mascarenhas, the director of Labor Management and Education in Health/SESAB, Bruno Guimarães and the founding partner of Consat – Consultancy in Occupational Health and former student of the Nursing course at Bahiana, Titian Assemany.
An achievement of the Bahiana, Gestra and Consat, the symposium was sponsored by CAPES, via public notice and brought together representative associations, health professionals and researchers from all over the country to debate themes related to citizenship, constitutional rights, the national situation and its impact on workers' health . Among the topics discussed were focused on "The National Occupational Health Policy", "Formality, Informality and Outsourcing", "Social Security and Labor Reform" and "Listening to the Worker".
Cristiane Magali highlights that the fact that the symposium took place at the Bahiana it allows the community – professors, researchers, collaborators – to reflect on their work. "This is something that needs to be reflected in the current sociopolitical and economic context we are going through. Thinking about the training of our undergraduate and graduate students, as people in training, we are awakening them to be attentive to taking care of the other, understanding that this is another he is a citizen, a being with a grievance, but he is a worker". She explains that, often, the health professional does not observe that a certain condition presented by a patient may be a reflection of their working relationship. "
The event brought to Salvador important names in the area of worker health, such as Carlos Minayo, PhD in Sciences from the Universidad de Salamanca and a researcher at FIOCRUZ/RJ; Dra. Angélica de Mello Ferreira, labor judge and president of the Association of Labor Justice Magistrates; Heliete Karam; Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from the Consevatoire National des Arts et Mètiers in Paris and Paulo Pena, Ph.D. in Developmental Socioeconomics from the École des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris.
For Bruno Guimarães, among the main current challenges are those related to the loss of workers' rights. "With all this new legislation, especially the labor legislation and the outsourcing law, we always put workers in an unfavorable place, in the relationship between managers and employees, and this makes, in fact, in this struggle that is related to issues of power, the worker will always end up giving in and losing". He points out as consequences the illness of the worker and the precariousness of working conditions. "I think the only way out is for workers to fight, to unite so that these social guarantees that are in the Constitution, the SUS and the National Workers Policy, initiatives in which we have been investing for so many years, do not go through a setback ".
The second day of the symposium featured the roundtable "I work, therefore I exist! When the worker speaks", when the themes will be discussed: "When sex workers speak"; "When midwives speak"; "When artisanal fishermen speak".
"We are undergoing a major reform in the work process and this is having repercussions in the lives of many people and in health as well. Many people, on the one hand, feel benefited, but the mass that generates this work is harmed and this changes with the time", declares Ticiana Assemany of Consat. According to her, it is necessary that other meetings are held in order to discuss these themes. "We need to bring this concern so that people stop complaining only on social media. We need to get together and take minutes and go after political representatives who can support and respond for us."
Check out the photos.