Access to oral health as a citizenship mechanism: a study based on the Brasil Sorridente program
This work makes a social investigation of the oral health of Brazilians, especially from the attention that it received with the creation of the Programa Brasil Sorridente. The question that was intended to be answered was: what is the history, in terms of public policies for oral health care in Brazil and, among these, to what extent did the Brasil Sorridente Program represent a citizenship mechanism? As sources, the work used specific literature and surveys SB Brasil 2003, SB Brasil 2010, preliminary results of SB Brasil 2020 (2021-2022), and PNS 2013 and PNS 2019. The text recovers the history of construction of public health in Brazil, highlighting the attention given to oral health in this system. It demonstrates how the 1988 Constitution and the creation of the SUS were important social achievements of redemocratization and created the legal and institutional structure for public health care understood in a universal and egalitarian way. In this context, the emergence of Brasil Sorridente represented a fundamental milestone for oral health to be understood as an integral and unavoidable part of the individual's overall health. In the construction of the work, the importance of oral health is also recovered and emphasized beyond physical and objective factors, which develops from the concept of oral health. Going forward, the work reveals how, in oral health, historical structural inequalities manifested by race, gender, income, education and Brazilian regions. Finally, comparisons of PNS data from 2013 and 2019 allow inferring the impact of scrapping the Brasil Sorridente Program observed since 2014.