A demanda do Acolhimento em uma Unidade de Saúde da Família em São Carlos, São Paulo

The user embracement practice proposed by the Brazilian Unified Health System (SUS) is not appropriately established yet in the routine of most services. Therefore, knowing some experiences may be useful to its implantation process. Objective: To describe the demand, care needs, morbidity, and referral to the User Embracement Service from the Family Health Unit of Agua Vermelha, in Sao Carlos, Sao Paulo, Brazil. Patients and methods: By means of an epidemiological, descriptive, populational, transversal and institutional study, 305 structured questionnaires applied from November 2009 to January 2010 were processed by Epi Info 2000 software, version 3.5.1. Results: It was found that most of the user embracements assisted people of the female gender in young adult age and of low socioeconomic insertion, with predominantly low complexity biological demand. The user embracements were performed mostly by nursing staff, however by means of an action whose resoluteness was very dependent of the physician. Nevertheless, 96% of the demands were resolved within the own Health Unit. Conclusions: The user embracement is a device that is being proposed to boost health assistance redirection for a model of expanded, integral, resolvent and multiprofessional care, but it is necessary to qualify the way it is being applied in practice, so it may contribute for this new direction. In other words, reducing the user embracement to a screening procedure will not ease the assistance improvement, how is expected from this device.