This study analyses education actions and their strategies for preventing and controlling dengue fever, highlighting constraints and difficulties. Conducted through a qualitative approach at the Primary Care Unit and 8 properties in Icaraí, Ceará State, Brazil, its 17 subjects are divided into groups: I (8 PCU users); II (4 Endemic Disease Control Agents); and III (5 healthcare practitioners). The data was collected through semi-structured interviews; participative observation and documentary analyses, using a hermeneutic dialectic analysis method. The findings indicate that health education actions are divergent, while transforming actions are ineffective in terms of impacts on the disease. Difficulties include: weak location-specific actions; educational messages whose contents are not tailored to their contexts; authoritarian and coercive strategies; absence of public policies; gaps between PCU and local population; stress on public health campaigns; practitioners who do not listen to the population and vice-versa; with technical expertise still prevailing over users. The evidence underscores the need for actions strengthening the possibilities of empowering the subjects, helping them become responsible for their own lives and citizenship construction processes.
Health education; Dengue fever; Nursing in the Public Health System; Hermeneutic dialectic