Percepções de discentes e docentes sobre a formação acadêmica na graduação: estudo quali-quantitativo sobre o ambiente educacional de uma faculdade de medicina

Abstract

Starting with the millennium, a new teaching format has been advocated for the training of health professionals to enable them to deal with complex and challenging issues that emerge in the field of work. Based on health needs and the comprehensiveness of care, academic training should contemplate the development of competencies to allow physicians to act in an interdisciplinary and collaborative manner, exercising a generalist, critical, and reflective practice, with effects on individual and collective health, operating social transformations. Medical schools are driven to innovations that include greater student participation, use of active methodologies, greater integration of theory and practice, participatory management of students and teachers in teaching processes, and incorporation of communication and information technologies. There are challenges concerning the effectiveness of the proposed changes, since, despite the efforts, the traditional teaching model remains hegemonic, whose characteristics do not favor collaborative and interdisciplinary work. Through qualitative-quantitative descriptive-analytical research, this study sought to understand the educational environment and the perceptions of students and teachers about academic training in an undergraduate medical course at a public university in Rio de Janeiro. We carried out a quantitative study by applying the Dundee Environment Education Measure (DREEM) questionnaire to students. The qualitative stage developed through focus groups with students and individual interviews with professors, encouraging narratives about broad issues of the educational environment. The data collected reflect the culture of medical education and detail the specificities of teaching and assessment methodologies, practical and clinical activities, interpersonal relationships and the teacher-student relationship, in the way these are actualized in the context studied. Using both the students' and teachers' perspective, we discussed the characteristics of the educational environment, trying to relate the current guidelines of medical education and the educational practices in force in the institution. We articulated the quantitative and qualitative results, reaching an in-depth knowledge about the perceptions about medical training and discussed the aspects of the educational environment that proved to be the most problematic for the implementation of changes, identifying the obstacles and the suggestions of the participants for dealing with them. The results indicate that academic training is exhaustive and the educational environment is not very motivating. The competitive relationships in the academic community hinder collaborative work among students, among professors, and between students and professors, and do not stimulate the development of interdisciplinarity. The medical school under study, despite remaining structured in traditional paradigms, has been gradually carrying out innovations. As a conclusion, more structural changes are necessary, as well as greater investments in social spaces that allow the academic community to learn about the innovations, to agree on educational objectives, to discuss the roles of the teacher and the student, to review teaching and assessment methodologies. To achieve these goals, it is necessary to encourage the involvement of teachers in improvement activities and a more intense participation of students in the processes of change