Academic monitorship and professional training in health: an integrative review

Abstract

Academic monitorship is a strategy that can help in professional health training by providing a dialogic channel between professors and students and favor teaching-learning processes. Thus, the objective of this study was to review the literature about monitorship and professional health training in Brazil and to identify its potentialities and difficulties. This is an integrative review with a systematic search of articles published until April 2017. It was carried out at the electronic libraries Scielo and Biblioteca Virtual em Saúde. Thirteen articles were found, most of them about monitorship in public universities in South and Southeast Brazil. Seven studies were about Nursing and Medicine courses only. Some identified potentialities were: decreased distances among the actors of monitorship, increasing of student learning and autonomy, and narrowing the monitor to teaching. Among the difficulties mentioned, there were: lack of time for joint work, and little participation of students in proposed activities. Most of the manuscripts were essentially descriptive, and did not emphasize the related theoretical and pedagogical aspects. Nevertheless, the set of articles suggests that monitorship can potentially add autonomy, criticality and humanization to student learning finetuned with social demands of health services. It is concluded that the theme academic monitorship is permeable for new studies and reflections about the teaching-learning processes focused on the specificities of the different health professions. It would be pertinent to discuss the educational benefits of monitorship in the various academic instances in order to incorporate it into the formal curriculum and then favor undergraduates’ participation.