Solidarity, alliance and commitment among healthcare professionals in the practices of the Brazilian Health System (SUS): a bioethical debate

Taking a bioethical standpoint, this paper aimed to analyze the social need for solidarity, alliance and professional commitment as a challenge within the practices of the Brazilian Health System (SUS). Through a qualitative study of descriptive and exploratory type, 30 subjects were interviewed (nurses, doctors and dentists) in a metropolitan region in southern Brazil. The results were analyzed from a bioethical standpoint through discursive textual analysis. The liberal-contractual framework that is reflected through public assistance reveals social vulnerabilities and gives rise to problems regarding the quality of services, thus suggesting that there is a relational construction preceding the mere contractual relationship: an alliance between equal subjects; a benevolent commitment towards other people who are different and/or vulnerable; and solidarity engaged in constructing a new state of dialogue, in the form of collective clinical excellence. For this, clinical bioethics needs to incorporate these values so as to transform the quality of attendance, which is still contractual and of rationalist, abstract and impersonal type, into new practices of dialogue.