Prazer e sofrimento do enfermeiro na relação com o trabalho: estudo em um hospital de urgência e emergência de Belo Horizonte

Abstract

The purpose of this analysis is to explore the expressions of pleasure and suffering innurses relationship work organization and who work in urgency and emergency unitsof a key hospital from the public health services provided in Belo Horizonte MG.Attending to this subject means, as well, considering everyday actions and factsrelated to nursing that require reflection and creativity, mostly in view of the hugediversity of activities developed. This is a qualitative study based on the theory andmethodology of historical and dialectical materialism. This approach allowed greaterdepth of the object of study by focusing on workers in the context and providing thevision of the phenomenon in its entirety and also its contradictions. The setting of thisstudy was the office of emergency and urgency of a large public hospital in BeloHorizonte and the sample taken to this analysis comprised 21 nurses working in thatdepartment chosen randomly. The systematization of the information obtained frominterviews and observations made it possible to identify and analyze the way nursingis organized and how this organization generates pleasure and/or pain in nurses. Theanalysis of these questions was anchored in empirical categories constructed in thiswork, that is emotional expressions arising from nurses and the defensivemechanisms employed by them while working in an emergency unit. These empiricalcategories concern: work organization in a hospital, relations of pleasure and pain ofnurses that work in an emergency unit, power relations within a hospital andcollective defensive strategies of nurses. Important issues emerged from the results,which emphasizes the main contradictions within these questions. A feature of theservice in the emergency unit reveals itself as an adverse condition to the employee,once the care that must be dedicated to those who are in critical conditions exposesnurses to inappropriate working conditions that may contribute to generate frictionswith the organization of work. The current organization of work allows the exploitationof employees in the emergency unit through the intensification of work, whichoverloads each worker, reduces downtimes and increases the aggregation of tasksand the lack of equivalence in payment according to nurses skills, capabilities andspecializations due to multiple working contracts. The sense of pleasure in work hasbeen related to the feelings of self utility, social recognition and the perception of themeanings of the work done from the beginning of it to the very end. Suffering, on theother hand involves organizational questions concerning the degradation of thehospital environment due to the overload of the professional nurse, the lack ofcommunication between working colleagues, the constant process of dealing withdeath issues and pain and also the management of conflicts involving authority andlack of autonomy. Within the relationship between the nurse and work in theemergency unit the dynamics of work may be damaging due to its organizationalconflicts and the morosity of the public health services. This context producesrelevant impacts in the public system of health, but also allows the sense of work tobe a fundamental aspect in the process of maintaining personal balance in face ofsuch working exigencies.