[Public health service: what women say]

The way poor women, who live in a given reality, perceive institutional policies of the health sector and face them is the object of reflection presented in this study. As category of analysis, the authors make use of social representation, understood as share of the contradictory social relations and of the individual and collective history of the groups, Authors discuss the inequities in public health care, focusing the way popular segments reaffirm and deny dominant knowledge and practices. Their speech about in the health attention showed, at the same time, absorption/reproduction of the rules spread by "official" medical system and the incorporation/translation of their necessities, experiences and specifics interests.