The 'locus' of health oversight in Brazil's Unified Health System - a place between the knowledge and the practices of social mobilization.

Supervision of a health system presupposes keeping an attentive eye on the health situation of populations, so as to understand health, illness and healthcare as indissociable manifestations of human existence. Taking this point of view, this article examines health practices from the basis of some of their processes of communication. These are markedly professional-centered in their logic, with their emphasis on scientific, vertical and authoritarian discourse, predominantly in the spaces of the Unified Health System (SUS).

[Health surveillance and territory: theoretical and methodological possibilities].

Diagnoses of living conditions and health status, the constitutive elements for the reproduction of social life in various places, are listed and treated as contents disconnected from the territory. The recognition of social dynamics, habits, and customs is highly important for the determination of human health vulnerabilities, which originate in the interactions of social groups in given geographic spaces. The full use of the territory as a strategy for analyzing and intervening in health conditions presupposes the identification of geographic objects, their utilization by the population, and their importance for flows of persons and materials.