IFMSA Brazil held a Multicenter Call on Black Population Health during Black November 2019, with a membership of Local Committees from all regions of the country. 52 Local Committees were enrolled in the activity, with predominant participation of the Northeast Regional which accounted for more than 40% of participants. The South and North 1 regions were the ones that contributed the least. However, only 19 of the registered committees were able to perform any kind of activity. The target audience of the activity consisted of medical students from Brazilian public universities, both public and private, in which various activities such as film sessions, conversation circles, lectures, and cultural exhibitions were held.
The activities were based on issues such as racism, national politics of integral health of the black population, prejudice, access of the black population to higher education and the marks left by slavery in Brazilian society. The main beneficiaries of the activity were doctors in training, and indirectly, the entire population that will be attended by them in the future, as an important training of these future professionals was held on a theme that will be very recurrent in their future performance. As a form of impact assessment, the committees applied a standardized questionnaire made through Google Forms. The first part of the questionnaire consisted of questions to characterize the local committee, including the name of the committee, regional and title of the activity. Then, the following questions were asked to assess participants’ prior knowledge and post activity. When analyzing the answers, we found that 79.7% had never participated in an event about the theme, with the majority answering not having enough knowledge to talk about it. In addition, 100% considered the subject to be extremely relevant and 66.9% revealed that they had never had classes on the health of the black population.
In the post-action questions, we found that more than 70% said they were safer to talk about the health of the black population and that more events on the subject were very important. It was also noticed that more than 80% rated the appropriate approach to activities, covering the main aspects of the subject discussed. It is noticed when analyzing the impact assessment that there are still many difficulties when it comes to discussing this topic, whether due to the lack of qualified people to conduct meetings, the poor adhesion of the academic community and the little interest of educational institutions in promoting discussions and debates. . In the long term, it is expected to create a culture of performing more activities on this theme, as it is still little addressed within the Federation, with only eight activities being carried out from January 2015 to October 2019.
Recent Comments