The pediatric internship in practice fields facing the challenge of new medicine courses in the Federal District

Abstract

In Brazil, the National Curriculum Guidelines (DCN) for medical courses guide a competency-based curriculum, with a curriculum divided into three cycles: basic, clinical, and internship, during which students undertake practical training. In the Federal District (DF), the increasing number of medical schools has led to competition for practice sites in the health units of the Unified Health System (SUS). In the last biennium, the pediatrics internship at UNIEURO took place in three hospitals and one SUS basic health unit. The issue is that there are students from various colleges, who must be allocated to sectors and periods in order to avoid schedule conflicts. Thus, the purpose of this article is to contextualize how difficulties have been addressed. The general objective is to report on the educational experience lived by pediatric interns, facing the challenge of being the sixth medical school in the DF. This is a descriptive study, a type of experience report. It is concluded that the internship has provided experiences in various regions and units where services cater to a population with a variety of cases and social vulnerabilities depending on their location. One issue to be addressed is that internships have been predominantly hospital-centric, despite several attempts at government policies to promote this change. Therefore, it is necessary to expand the scenarios for pediatric internships to include Primary Health Care (PHC), as well as to structure points of primary, secondary, and tertiary care.