Language, Literacy, and Health: Discourse in Brazil's National Health
System analyzes language, literacy, and health as social practices in
Brazil's national health system, the Unified Health System (SUS), with a
particular focus on the Family Health Strategy program. The SUS was
established in the 1990s, offering free consultations, health promotion
activities, and home visits by a professional team to the Brazilian
population. Using research conducted in two different Brazilian regions,
the Northeast and the Southeast, Izabel Magalhães and Kênia Lara da
Silva discuss language and literacy as discourse-a very important
dimension of health practice-and different uses of texts, including
multimodal texts. The research, analysis, and the authors' ethnographic
approach bring to light some issues with SUS practices, and the authors
suggest improvements. This book contributes to the debate about language
and literacy in health practices, in which patients are partly
responsible for keeping well.