Ética e atuação profissional: percepção de agentes comunitários de saúde

The perceptions of the Community Health Agent (CHA) referred to ethics in their work have been evaluated in this study. A questionnaire with social and ethical issues was applied in 61 ACS. 90% reported having received information about ethics, and “training courses” was the most cited source (68.9%). On a scale from 1 (least) to 5 (maximum), 67% claimed to have knowledge about ethics among 4 or 5 and 88.5% reported that this topic has an importance of 5 in their work. Ethical conflicts exposed had an average of 75% of respondents in agreement with the reference sources, and the two items involving “information privacy” showed the greatest disagreement. Ethics was considered important by the professional performance of subjects who had a good perception about the issue; however the topic about privacy of information generated controversy.