Representações e práticas de profissionais da atenção básica sobre HIV/AIDS

Abstract

This is a quantitative study, based on the Theory of Social Representation, whose objective is to understand the representations and practices of professionals that act in the basic attention about HIV/aids. Twelve health professionals, seven nurses and five doctors, were interviewed. These professionals work in two Health Centers in the city of Belo Horizonte for at least sis months. The subjects were contacted in their work places and invited to participate of the interview. The initial question of the interview was: tell me what you think about HIV and aids infection, about your attending in that area, about the infected people and the risk taken by the health professional in his/hers work routine. The analysis of the interviews was done through structural analysis of narrative, proposed by Dubar and Demazière (1997). Interpreting the data, the representations of basic attention professionals were organized in three categories:.HIV/ aids; the work with HIV/ aids; infection risk in the work routine. The results show spaces of permanence and change in the social representations of the subjects interviewed, resulting in the recognizing, by them, of the importance of HIV/aids prevention in the basic health attention, without, however, doing systematic and constant actions that may contribute effectively to the reduction of the spread of the disease. The results also show that the interviewed health professionals know the infection risk in their work routine in the health systems, and consider it very low. They believe that the individual protection equipment may minimize the risks and that the risks do not interfere in the attending of the patients. This study also allowed recognizing that the basic attention needs constant adjustments to guarantee the access and the integrality by the users. Those adjustments are necessary, as well as health promotion actions and prevention of diseases, besides changes in the professional formation, bigger offer of capacitation during working hours, and moments of collective analyzing, by the professionals, of their jobs.