Civilian health surveillance, population studies and participation

Abstract

In the mid-1990s, Victor Valla proposed to incorporate the population participation in the practice of health surveillance, through Paulo Freire’s popular education. This counterpoint to traditional surveillance practices, called civil health surveillance, added to the expanded concept of health, and has a strong connection with the critical perspective of Epidemiology as a means to understand the dialectical relationship between social classes and their lived spaces. The practice of civil surveillance aims to overcome essential gaps left by traditional methods of public health investigation. It includes a lack of attention to socio-cultural contexts, the construction of risk located only in the individual, and the representation of public health agendas that privilege and pathologize certain behaviors. This paper discusses the concept of civil health surveillance, the locus of discussion of population studies in the reification of the role of the contextual effect in explaining the social production of health and the incorporation of popular participation in health surveillance as an element of social transformation. The deepening of this discussion allows a participatory construction of new health models focused on the effective reduction of health inequities and, consequently, the effective universalization of the right to health.