Profile of the Basic Health Unit manager – duties and challenges from the professional’s perspective

Abstract

This paper discusses the findings of a research that sought to elucidate the experience lived by managers of Basic Health Units (UBS, in its Portuguese acronym) in Divinópolis, Minas Gerais, Brazil, intending to contribute to management development in health. It aims to understand the development of the duties of the Primary Health Care (PHC) manager from the perspective of these same professionals. When they become managers – often unprepared for the job – these professionals faced an intense, varied, and fragmented work routine and come up against institutional priorities that make it difficult to implement their agendas and plan activities. Highly dependent on other sectors, managers need to organize a broad network of relationships inside and outside the institution to facilitate their work performance. Enduring tensions, solving problems, and overcoming challenges, they revised their concepts and underwent a process of change in consciousness that led them to think and act like managers. Being a UBS manager meant, for each one, being an agent of change who works in a high-pressure environment, leading transformation processes in their unit, depending on the community in which they operate.