ORAL HEALTH CARE NETWORKS

Abstract

Related to a great achievement of Brazilian citizenship, the Unified Health System (SUS) has been improved since its creation by the National Constituent Assembly of 1987/1988. It brings in its origin the reflection of the Brazilian Sanitary Movement, enhanced by the economic, political and social crises, intensely aggravated in the 70's that ended up boosting the ideology of health for all. The SUS brings in its philosophy the doctrinal principles of universality, equity and integrality. However, regardless of the advances, it still has practical weaknesses to fully guarantee these rights to more than 200 million Brazilians. From this perspective, Health Care Networks (RAS) have shown to be efficient in the continuity of care, betting on the restructuring of Primary Health Care (PHC), which assumes the ordering and coordination of the care network, thought from the perspective of its organizational attributes. In this context, dental care formatted as a thematic network of Oral Health follows the same guiding principles, still supported by the central axes of the National Oral Health Policy, edited by the Ministry of Health in 2003, becoming nationally recognized as Smiling Brazil. This policy aims at remodeling dental care historically marked by limited access, mutilating practices and unavailability of specialized services and provision of dental prostheses. Brasil Sorridente is consolidated as it incorporates oral health professionals into the Family Health Strategy, invests in the construction of Specialized Dental Centers (CEO) and Dental Prosthesis Laboratories. This work aims to approach the networks, identifying and prioritizing the components of the oral health thematic network, conceptualizing and discussing the work processes adopted by PHC and CEO's. It is justified by the importance of dentistry in the inseparable context of health, enabling a better quality of life, being presented in the form of a narrative literature review, built by digital access to the following databases: Virtual Health Library, Google Scholar, Scientific Electronic Library On -line (SCIELO), MEDLINE, LILACS. Articles in Portuguese and English of relevant content for the proposed objectives, published in the last 5 years, were selected, with the exception of texts by authors with well-known knowledge on the subject.