Introduction:

Health promotion represents a key element of a primary-care based health system. Nevertheless, poor integration of the health promotion actions still prevails in the undergraduate training and the professional performance of generalist practitioners.

Aim:

To describe the contributions of a health promotion practice in the undergraduate medical training, as expressed by medical students during their internship in a rural area.

Subjects and methods:

Qualitative descriptive study, based on the University of Chile medical student's reports of their health promotion activities developed during 2016 to 2018. Narrative content analysis was performed in order to inductively identify descriptive categories for these contributions.

Results:

Nine categories of contributions were identified; five of them are related to the design and implementation of health promotion activities at community level (acknowledgment of audience's characteristics; adaptation to the audience; self-awareness of limitations, difficulties and uncertainty management; appreciation of the community wisdom and knowledge; satisfaction with the activity results), and four further categories refer to the recognition of the physician's role in the community (local context assessment; critical appraisal of institutional roles and actors; deficiencies in previous medical training; perspectives on community work and the physician's role in that context).

Conclusions:

Community-based health promotion activities are important scenarios for learning about social groups, adaptation to local conditions and strengthening the physician's role. These are perceived as contributions to the undergraduate training of medical professionals.

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