Abstract

The healthcare system in Chile is based on the Comprehensive Care Model with a family and community approach, whose structural and pivotal core is primary care. Insertion of speech and language professionals at this level is incipient, and studies on the subject are scarce. This research sought to describe the practices and experiences of Speech Therapy in Primary Health Care (PHC) from the perspective of users, speech therapists, and other professionals in the healthcare field residing in the city of Santiago during 2017. For this purpose, a qualitative exploratory study was carried out based on the hermeneutic-interpretive paradigm, where three focus groups were carried out, and the information was analyzed using content analysis. The most relevant categories that emerged from the analysis show that the three groups agree with a growing need for the presence of Speech Therapy in PHC, in order to respond to issues concerning human communication and oral feeding. Furthermore, the three groups agree that this need goes hand in hand with a diversification of the professional actions of speech therapists who work in PHC, in addition to the need for training in the family and community health model. Therefore, it is concluded that the conceptual-theoretical framework on which the professionals base their work should be reconfigured, and training should be reoriented towards PHC.