Abstract

This chapter presents a university experience in health and education in rural areas, developed in southern Chile since 1994, in the context of an Interdisciplinary Professional Practices Program with a territorial and integral perspective; these interventions in rural schools, applying a work strategy that contemplates different complementary dimensions to each other. The intervention model includes the Biomedical dimension (evaluation of integral physical health), the sociocultural (perception of complexity of health-illness-care from social actors) and that of health education (to transform the health situation of the individual and the environment). In the course of the years of work, the permanence of the formative proposal of students of health sciences is valued, in a way close to the social and sanitary reality of the territory. The university presence in rural areas has allowed expanding the access and coverage for health care of the school population, as well as bringing worlds that must be communicated, to contribute to the reduction of the inequalities present in rural children’s education contexts.