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  ounterpoint 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.