Teacher training and engagement in Brazilian health higher education: fragilities and strengths

Abstract

The pandemic revealed the need to discuss in depth the quality of Health training in the country, highlighting the central role of professors in this process. In this context, the objective of this article was to investigate the training and teaching activity in higher education in Health, considering profile, engagement and main professional perceptions. This is a cross-sectional, quantitative study with a descriptive and analytical approach, which investigated the didactic-pedagogical training and the perceptions of the teaching activity of 223 Health higher education professors throughout Brazil. Among them, most consider their teaching function as the main one (71.30%), claim to know the National Curriculum Guidelines of their respective acting courses (91.48%) and report familiarity with the elements related to the body faculty present in the course and institutional evaluation documents (83.41%). Although professionals from the private institutions (89.8% versus 73.08% from the public ones, p<0.001) report, notably, that their institutions have adequate infrastructure, there is relative dissatisfaction with regard to remuneration, especially among professionals with original training in Medicine (59.57% versus 34.88% in other areas, p=0.001). In the context of virtualization of teaching work, 85.20% claim to use technological tools and 69.06% feel able to work in online teaching, as well as 58.74% consider it effective. This study sheds light on a subject that is still little explored in the country, but which represents a great impact on the quality of training of Brazilian health professionals.