Limits and constraints of the instruments that control the work of community health agents in the Family Health Strategy

To be considered a link between inhabitants and the service does not reveal, in a straightforward way, the scope of the community health agents' duties, nor does it offer visibility to the demands to which these professionals are exposed in their daily work within the Family Health Strategy. The aim of this study is to analyze the tools used to control the community health agents' social action and these professionals' possibilities of emancipation based on the notion of communicative action proposed by Jurgen Habermas. This is a qualitative study carried out at a Primary Care Unit in the city of Sao Paulo. Semi-structured interviews were carried out with 14 community agents who have at least 2 years of experience. The results show the dominance of instrumental reason over communicative reason in planning activities, in technical criteria for decision-making and evaluation, and in instruments for labor recording. We verified that there are opportunities of emancipation in communicative actions in which community agents, through dialogue, develop mutual understanding actions with patients that complement technical actions. It is also through dialogue oriented towards the construction of consensuses that teamwork cooperative processes are developed around common goals. We found that community agents resist the dictates of instrumental actions through intersubjective understanding, promoted by the communicative rationality that permeates the world of life, thus enabling emancipation situations regarding tensions and conflicts that are inherent in the mediation work.