Abstract:

The National Telehealth Brazil Network Program aims to strengthen and improve the quality of primary health care in the Unified Health System, integrating Permanent Health Education (PHE) and assistance support through information and communication technologies (ICT). Vocational training through Teleducation are distance educational activities through ICT to support the qualification of students, professionals and health workers, constituting a form of permanent education in service of the primary care network. The objective of this research was to register the accesses and professional education activities (Teleducation) carried out by Telehealth Amazonas to contribute to the training and updating of health professionals in the State of Amazonas-Brazil. This is a descriptive and cross-sectional study of professional training activities, as well as access to this information carried out by health professionals from the state of Amazonas in the period from 2017 to 2020. The Scientific Technical Center for Telehealth is linked to the State University do Amazonas, Manaus-Brasil and has 68 Telehealth points distributed in 62 municipalities and 5 indigenous communities, reaching 100% coverage of the state of Amazonas. The challenges encountered for the education of professionals in Amazonas are: isolation of the municipalities; small road network; difficulties in virtual access; different ethnicities'; connectivity; professional turnover. The following number of Teleducation activities were recorded: 187 in 2017, 333 in 2018, 447 in 2019 and 307 in 2020 (need to update).

In teleducation the modality web-lecture was the most frequent with 2,162 different activities in the period, followed by 1,374 web seminars, 201 discussion forum and 35 management meetings. Regarding the participants, we had 19,148 total professionals in this period. As for the use of telehealth social networks, the youtube channel had a total of 7,080 subscribers with 855,798 post views, 2,553 Instagram followers, 915 on Facebook and 220 on Twitter. The most accessed video was “Collection for COVID-19 test” with 342,423 views followed by “Cervical cancer screening” with 21,392 views. The age group of users who accessed the most prevalent telehealth material was 25-34 years (35.31%) using a mobile device in 66.66% of the cases. During the period, a wide participation of professionals was observed in the various training activities offered by Telehealth, mainly during the period of the COVID pandemic with the viewing of a video on the theme, thus, it is concluded that the importance of virtual activities, especially at this time face-to-face contact is committed to continuing training and health updates.

Keywords:

Telehealth, Teleducation, health professionals, professional education.