THE ROLE OF WOMEN IN THE SEARCH FOR HEALTH OF CHILDREN AND ADOLESCENTS: AN ANALYSIS OF THE JUDICIALIZATION OF PUBLIC HEALTH IN PERNAMBUCO, BRAZIL

Abstract

The Constitution of the Federative Republic of Brazil of 1988 points out that health is a fundamental social right, composing the right to life itself in its broadest form, being an integral part of the right to a dignified life. It is even more protective when it deals with the right to health of children and adolescents, who have absolute priority in health policies. One of the reasons for the increase in the judicialization of public health, according to recent studies, is the growing awareness and search for the realization of fundamental rights and guarantees, therefore, it is not necessarily a negative phenomenon for a Democratic State of Law. In view of the need for adequate protection and more specialized processing, the Court of Justice of the State of Pernambuco created the Center for Justice 4.0 - Child and Youth Health of Pernambuco, with absolute competence for the processing and judgment of health-related claims that have a child or adolescent as the active pole of the procedural legal relationship and as a passive pole a legal entity of public law,  this nucleus having territorial jurisdiction throughout the State, with the exception of the single court and general jurisdiction districts. However, children and adolescents, according to Brazilian procedural legislation, have the capacity to be a party, but they do not have the capacity to be in court on their own, needing, for that, the figure of the procedural representative. These representatives are of paramount importance to initiate and succeed in lawsuits, because, in practice, they are the ones who perform the material acts in favor of the parties, which is why this research analyzed data regarding the plaintiffs and their procedural representatives in a quantitative and retrospective cross-sectional descriptive study that analyzed the 749 lawsuits judicialized by the Electronic Judicial Proceedings System,  of the 4.0 Center for Childhood and Youth Health of the Court of Justice of Pernambuco, Brazil, incorporated in 2023. As a result, it was noticed that the majority of the applicants were male (61.9%; n= 464), being significantly higher than those of the female (37.4%; n=280), in addition to 5 (0.7%) cases in which the applicants presented both sexes. The prevalence of mothers as the only procedural representative was 76.4% (n=572) of the cases, followed by only 14.9% (n=112) of the cases in which the representatives were exclusively the father.  In relation to the cause of action, Autism Spectrum Disorder – ASD was more frequent, with 301 requests, which means that in 40.1% of the cases analyzed, at least one of the causes of action was this. This was followed by Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) (10.1%; n=76), epilepsy in all its forms (8.9%; n=67;) and severe acute respiratory syndrome (8.1%; n=61). The findings of the research allowed us to verify the important and arduous role played by women in the search for health of their children or family members, and the knowledge of these data contributes to the understanding and prevention of judicialization.