The Family Health Program is the main strategy of primary health care in the Universal Health System in Brazil and its core tenets are the participation and the social control of the program by the health care users. Therefore, the aim of this work was the analysis of the different ways consumers were described and positioned in the interviews and focal groups developed with professionals and staff managers. The discourse analysis perspective adopted for this task relies on the recognition of the constituting force of discourses and their role in the ordering of social life and the provision of the subjects’ positions. The selected discursive constructions were organized by the subject, and identified five type of discourses: 1) the users’ needs and problems; 2) the users’ mistrust in regard to the FHP; 3) the users’ dissatisfaction with the service; 4) the conflictive relations between professionals and the Community Council members and 5) co-responsibility discourses. The discursive analysis shows the difficulties professionals and staff management have to construct horizontal and dialogical relationships with the users, due to the power relations at the Universal Health System (SUS), permeated by strong social inequality.
Discursive constructions; Family Health Program; Health care consumers; Discourse analysis
