Child and Women’s Health Graduate Program
About the Program
Stricto Sensu - Listagem de Seções
The Program
The Child and Women's Health Graduate Program (PPGSCM) is linked to the Fernandes Figueira National Institute of Women's, Child, and Adolescent Health (IFF/Fiocruz), the unit responsible for teaching, research, and care in women's, child, and adolescent health.
The PPGSCM's mission is to train researchers and professors in Collective Health at the Master's and Doctoral levels, with the capacity to lead the critical and innovative production of knowledge and practices for the Brazilian Unified Health System (SUS), to advocate for health as a right. To this end, the Program focuses on the health of children, women and adolescents in the interface with other subjects of law, from an expanded perspective of diversity and inclusion.
Commitment to Collective Health, the approximation with demands and social movements and the quality of academic production, from professors and students, are central Program’s features, along with the search for continuous, expanded exchanges with national and international research and education institutions to continually improve the quality of its work.
The Program consists of academic Master's and Doctoral courses. The former aims at technical collective health training, the development of skills for academic research and teaching and, more generally, enabling a more qualified performance of graduates in different health system sectors. The doctorate primarily aims to develop the ability to conduct original and independent research in different Public Health fields.
Besides regular courses, the PPGSCM receives researchers for post-doctoral training, with or without a scholarship, obeying the rules established in public calls. Candidates must present a project and work plan per with the research lines of the programs and their supervisors. At the end of the internship, the candidate must submit a report on the activities conducted and objectives achieved.
CAPES data
Access to the Sucupira Platform: https://sucupira.capes.gov.br/sucupira/
Education Institution: 31010016 | Oswaldo Cruz Foundation (FIOCRUZ)
Basic Area: Public Health (40602001) | Assessment Area: Collective Health
Academic Regimen: Semestral | Program Code: 31010016005P5
Program Concentration Area: Child and Women’s Health
CAPES Score: Master’s: six (6) | Doctorate: six (6)
Postgraduate Program Committee (CPG)
Coordinator: Ivia Maksud
Link CV Lattes: http://lattes.cnpq.br/5338114042740741
E-mail:
Luiz Antonio da Silva Teixeira
Link CV Lattes: http://lattes.cnpq.br/9439210358405759
E-mail:
Other members:
Corina Helena Figueira Mendes
Link CV Lattes:
E-mail:
Paula Gaudenzi
Link CV Lattes:
E-mail:
Saint-Clair Gomes Jr.
Link CV Lattes: http://lattes.cnpq.br/3477850932376112
E-mail:
Students’ Representative:
Camila Rebouças:
Leonardo Peçanha:
Target Audience
Higher-level professionals interested in conducting research in Collective Health, emphasizing child, adolescent and women's health in the interface with other groups of greater vulnerability and other subjects of law, from an expanded perspective of diversity and inclusion.
Elective Courses
Elective courses can be accessed through the following link.
Doctorate Courses
PPGSCM - Disciplinas Doutorado
Compulsory – Doctorate
Health and Society
Professor: Suely Deslandes
Workload: 60 hours
Credits: 4
Objectives: Based on the theoretical instruments of Sociology, to analyze some contemporary social problems that have challenged paradigms and strategies in Collective Health, whether for the formulation of effective policies or for meeting their complex demands. The first part of the course focuses on the process of globalization and its societal and political implications. The second part explores the implications of globalization on public agendas for the health sector and social movements for health.
Synthesis of Syllabus Content: The globalization process, its implications for the health of populations and individuals and the sector's action initiatives. The role of the State and public policies to face global problems. Work precariousness/uberization. Formal employment precariousness. Poverty and social exclusion. Globalization and the (re)production of poverty. The several, new patterns of social exclusion. Social differences. The challenge of social inequalities for Health. The penal solution, the prison state. The global health agenda. Networked social movements. Global social movements for health. From the perspective of implication with the production of reflective frameworks for the understanding of contemporary settings, we will analyze cases that dialogue with the COVID-19 pandemic and other local and global issues.
Compulsory – Doctorate
Principles and Scientific Methods for Writing a Thesis
Professors: Claudia Bonan, Luiz Teixeira, Paula Gaudenzi, and Tatiana Wargas
Workload: 105 hours
Credits: 7
The course aims to provide an overview of the field of Collective Health and help students develop their Research Projects within this field. It will be divided into three parts:
(1) Social Sciences, History, and Health;
(2) Social Science Studies Topics;
(3) Advanced Doctorate Seminars.
The first part, which will take place in the first semester of the doctorate, aims to make students understand the historical process of construction of the Brazilian health system and develop the ability to formulate analyzes from the instruments of the field of social sciences, working with concepts and theories to give them subsidies for the production of their theses.
The second part is applied in the second semester of the doctorate and mainly aims to subsidize the understanding of science as a field of social practices, discussing from an interdisciplinary perspective production, validation, and legitimation of scientific knowledge, the relational dynamics between the sciences and other social fields, including other fields of knowledge production, scientific disputes and controversies inside and outside the scientific field.
The third part, in turn, will occur in the third semester of the doctorate and aims to contribute to the development of individual Research Projects, in the sense of specifying the research object or problem; the justification and relevance of the study; the use of methodology consistent with the work’s objective and support to developing the ability to operate concepts and theories relevant to the Project (theoretical foundation).
Master's Courses
PPGSCM - Disciplinas Mestrado
Compulsory – Master’s
Child and Adolescent Growth and Development
Professors: Maria Elisabeth Lopes Moreira, Fernanda Valente Mendes Soares
Invited Professors: Maria de Fátima Junqueira Marinho and Maria Dalva Barbosa Baker Méio.
Workload: 45 hours
Credits: 3
Objective: To encourage students to learn the theory and practice of the dimensions involved in physical growth and human development, using them as the basis for monitoring children's health from conception to adolescence.
Synthesis of Syllabus Content: Intrauterine growth and monitoring of fetal well-being, low birth weight and its repercussions in adult life, the impact of environment and heredity on the genetic target; Growth curves: methodology and statistics; Growth curves: critical analysis and practical use; Development and its relationship with maturation and physical growth; Growth disorders and indications for the use of growth hormone; the use of growth curves as indicators of the health of a population.
Compulsory – Master’s
Epidemiology
Professors: Daniele Marano and Joviana Avanci
Workload: 60 hours
Credits: 4
Objective: Introduce the concepts and method of scientific investigation in Statistics and Epidemiology to realize the analysis of scientific articles and the development of clinical and epidemiological research in health. With this knowledge, the student will grasp the theoretical foundations of the scientific method in the quantitative area to describe and analyze a dataset.
Synthesis of Syllabus Content: Introduction to quantitative research in the health area. Concepts, variables, typology and measurement scales. Exploratory data analysis. Preparation of tables and graphs for different types of qualitative and quantitative variables. Measures of central tendency and dispersion of a distribution. Measures to present nominal data. Object and logic of epidemiological investigation. Measures of association and Impact: Relative Risk, Odds Ratio, Attributable Risk. Causal inference. Bias and confounders. Validity and reliability. Epidemiological studies in the clinical and population context (experimental, cross-sectional, case-control, and cohort). Critical analysis of the medical literature.
Health policies for women, children and adolescents
Professors: Maria Auxiliadora Mendes Gomes and Marcos Nascimento
Workload: 60 hours
Credits: 4
General Objective: Study of policies in women's, child, and adolescent health, in light of the notions of the right to health, comprehensiveness, humanization, gender and reproductive rights, covering historical, conceptual, epidemiological, political, cultural, legal, and normative aspects. Work Method: Conferences, lectures, and class debates on compulsory reading texts. Assessment: Attendance and punctuality, previous reading of the indicated texts, preparation of reading notes, class participation, and presentation of final work will be considered for the final grade.
Synthesis of Syllabus Content: Gender as an analytical category for studying health practices and policies – Brazilian health history – The Unified Health System: Historical background and contemporary aspects – National Humanization Policy – The notion of comprehensiveness and its potential in the analysis of health policies – Demographic and epidemiological transition in Brazil – Social determinants of health – Epidemiological panorama of the morbimortality of children, adolescents, and women in Brazil – Historical and contemporary aspects of the construction of Health policies for women, children, and adolescents – Maternal and neonatal morbimortality - Obstetric and neonatal care policies – Prevention and treatment of conditions resulting from violence against women, adolescents, and children - AIDS among women, children, and adolescents – Fertility, contraception and abortion in Brazil – Comprehensive and humanized approach to cervical and breast cancer – Chronic illness among children and adolescents.
Compulsory – Master’s
Master’s Advanced Seminars
Professors: Ivia Maksud and Vânia Mattos
Workload: 45 hours
Credits: 3
The course aims to provide students with theoretical in-depth knowledge and research process training. It expects to monitor the development of Master's students' projects from their enrollment until qualification. It is divided into two parts. In the first, a set of theoretical - expository and dialogued – classes aims to offer content to contribute to the theoretical-methodological foundation of the projects. Professors who work at the Library, the Research Department, and the Ethics Committee are invited to contribute to the process of turning students into researchers. Subsequently, students make presentations of their projects, with the participation of their advisors and other PG professors as debaters.
The syllabus content of the first part includes:
- a) The construction of the research project.
- b) Conceptual introduction to databases and online research in Health Sciences. Elaboration of search strategies: Keywords, Descriptors, Boolean Operators; Use of the bibliographic reference manager Zotero; Plagiarism in academic production.
- c) Research Ethics.
- d) Flow of research projects at IFF/FIOCRUZ.
Compulsory – Master’s
Pedagogical Processes in Collective Health: policy, knowledge, and emancipation
Professors: Martha Cristina Nunes Moreira and Danielle Ribeiro de Moraes
Invited Professor: Roseli Fonseca da Rocha
Workload: 45 hours
Credits: 3
The courses understands the teaching space as creation, with the classroom as the locus of political interaction between knowledge, know-how, and student-professor reciprocity. Anchored in the field of collective health, it recognizes that the ways of learning and teaching in this field intersect with how epidemiology, social and human sciences, and health policy and planning circumscribe and talk about their objects.
To this end, we organized the course into four axes:
(1) to recover the handicraft that resides in the construction of the classroom, discussing the places of those who propose to be professors, in the transmission and the connection with the subjects of knowledge;
(2) to recover with readings and interactions with professors how they produce their courses according to the three fields in which they identify themselves, whether epidemiologists, humanities scientists, or, still, planning, policy, and management/evaluation scientists;
(3) to understand how the perspective of permanent education translates problems and raw material of the work of education and production of healthcare in embracing affirmative actions and social inclusion;
(4) and how to think about techniques and evaluations, in the relationships with thought paradigms and emancipatory political options.
Objective: Provide future professors with the acquisition of basic subsidies to critically reflect on the pedagogical practice and rebuild a practice, re-dimensioning the teaching work and contributing to a transforming action in society.
Compulsory – Master’s
Qualitative Health Research
Professors: Ivia Maksud and Tatiana Wargas
Workload: 45 hours
Credits: 3
Objectives:
(a) understand the bases of social research in order to contextualize them in the field of health;
(b) discuss the scientific nature and relevance of qualitative methods in health research practice;
(c) Recognize some possibilities of methods and techniques used in research.
Syllabus content:
- An invitation to think.
- Initial reflections on Qualitative Research: Reflexivity, implications, and intersubjectivity in research.
- Research project – the importance of constructing the object and the starting question.
- Contexts, social markers, intersectionality.
- Introducing Fieldwork.
- Methodological Strategies: Familiarizing with Ethnography.
- Methodological Strategies: Case Study and Participant Research.
- Methodological Strategies: Participant observation and participant research
- Talking about Self-ethnography and Writing.
- About the different types of Narratives.
- Working with Documents.
- After the field: Analysis, interpretation of qualitative data and research writing.
Research Lines
- Health Situations related to Chronicity and Disabilities
This line includes social studies of disability, experiences of chronic, rare, and complex illness, in an interdisciplinary dialogue with public health genetics, epidemiology, health economics and sociological and anthropological approaches. The studies value the dimension of subjectivity and intersubjectivity at play in health practices, dialoguing with public health policies and social movements, considering gender, race/ethnicity, generation, class, and territory social markers.
- Maternal, Perinatal and Child Health
This line includes studies covering pregnancy, abortion, delivery, childbirth, puerperium, death, and the repercussions of these events on the health of women and children and in different life stages. It also covers studies on growth, neurodevelopment, nutrition, and human breastfeeding, and consequences on child and adolescent health from the perspectives of epidemiology, planning, public policies, evaluation of health technologies, and sociocultural aspects.
- Gender, Sexuality, Reproduction, and Health
This line includes studies on gender, sexuality, and reproduction in their interface with health and their articulations with ethnicity/skin color, social class, sexual orientation, gender identity, generation, disabilities, and life courses. Research addresses human rights, social, subjective, and political aspects, social movement actions, and health practices. They include socio-anthropological studies that can dialogue with epidemiology, public policies and evaluation of health technologies.
- Violence and Health
This line includes studies on the effects of different expressions of violence on populations and social groups, observing how their dynamics conform based on the specificities of the life course, ethnicity/skin color, gender, social classes/strata, sexual orientation, disability, stakeholders involved, territories, and socio-institutional contexts. The studies also consider the perspectives of acting on the sociocultural matrices that generate violence, and the promotion of health, care, and a peace culture. The relationship between health, society, and environment, integrating epidemiology, social sciences, politics, planning, and management and evaluation, is valued by studies of this line from the perspectives of epidemiology, planning, public policies, evaluation of health technologies, and sociocultural aspects.
Program Background
The Program started in 1988, under the coordination of Professor Marco Antônio Barbieri, based on a collaborative process between FIOCRUZ and the University of São Paulo (USP–Ribeirão Preto), with the Master's in Child Health. It was characterized by expanding the limits of the merely clinical approach, typical of Master's Programs in Pediatrics, through a more comprehensive approach, from the focus on Collective Health, including, especially, the inputs of Social Sciences, Public Policies, and Epidemiology.
In 1996, the Program opened up to a multidisciplinary perspective, offering slots for professionals from all health areas and expanding its thematic scope to include Women's Health. Over the last few years, the Program reaffirms its connection with Collective Health, through successive curricular adaptations. The Doctorate course started in 1996, with the maturation of the Program.
The PPGSCM has been incorporating new themes and objects to its lines of research in recent decades. In the four-year evaluation of CAPES 2017-2020, the Program received a score of 6, and is currently considered a reference program in Collective Health.
