Objective: Analysing the concepts of Continuous Health Education -CHE (EPS -in Portuguese), operated by municipal managers and translated into official documents. Method: Qualitative research with the use of official documents and semi-structured interviews with the Municipal Health Secretaries or Coordinators of Primary Health Care in the Northeast Region of São Paulo State, and thematic analysis of empirical material. Results: Results indicate difficulties in the municipalities problematizing their management practices, services and health care; EPS tools presented are insufficient and unsatisfactory for amending the array of problems raised and are still far from the routine of Primary Care services. Conclusion: Despite efforts to implement EPS actions for the strengthening of primary care, the process appears to be incipient.

This study aims to identify and analyze the concepts and practices of Continuing Health Education (EPS) operated by nurses in primary health care units in small towns (up to 20,000 inhabitants), in the coverage area of the DRS III-Araraquara-SP. The EPS, policy geared to the development of workers and management tool in the Unified Health System (SUS), is leveraged by the principles of health reform that presents important turning to the Federal Constitution of 1988 and follows in clear cutting and development. The proposal EPS national policy is making organic relationship between education and health programs and services, and between teaching and health care, including education and healthcare management, institutional development and social control in health, aiming higher resolving power, satisfaction and adaptation. Credits to the EPS with a decentralizing logic upward, transdisciplinary and given its flexible, active and didactic, favoring the learning ability and creative coping, cooperating with the development of skills and the means of modification towards institutional democratization. It is hoped, as a result, improved quality and health care. It is a qualitative approach to character study, supported by EPS concepts, with primary data obtained through interviews with semi-structured 32 nurses of basic health units of the municipalities with up to 20,000 inhabitants of the DRS III Araraquara, totaling 14 counties. The study was submitted to the Research Ethics Committee. In content analysis in the thematic side four major themes were identified: what they think nurses on EPS; articulate the concept of EPS to work; what do nurses to operate the EPS; EPS in MPP: the point of view of nurses. Credited to the study the possibility of identifying EPS practices that have been developed in the cities and that can support the expansion of possibilities of strengthening these actions in all the municipalities.