Sofrimento no trabalho : a construção social do adoecimento de trabalhadoras da saúde.

Abstract

In the current world context, traversed by technological achievements and steady structural changes in the realm of work, the incidence of patologies and injuries concerning workers cannot be ignored. They share illnesses and casualties (sickening and dying) with the majority of the population which are characterized by common patologies let alone a sickening process closely related to their labor activities.In this sense, the following research aims at analyzing and reflecting on the factors which contribute for the suffering of workers under the perspective of the social construction of sickening of female health workers, in light of the work process carried out throughout the public health services. To approach the work of women and the health at work helped us to harmonize analises capable of articulating the process of work healthwise as well as its organizational principles encompassing public services, from a perspective of gender. Metodologically put, the course of investigation employed a dialectical strategy, followed by a qualitative study, which interviewed 17 female health workers and resorted to field reports on a daily basis as instruments for the collection of data. By using qualitative evaluation, the data were analyzed based on the method of “Analysis of Content”, through thematic analysis. Once in contact with the workers, several similar stories emerged, within different institutional spaces, thus demonstrating that suffering at work is not an explicit state, of easy identification. It is mostly perceived non-verbally and non-visibly, thus highlighting its social invisibility. In this perspective, the situations of suffering and sickening related to work were implicitly expressed in the workers´ narratives.The factors related to the suffering and sickening were due to the difficulties between the workers and the public at the moment of rendering health services, secondly, to the lack of cooperation and acknowledgment at work, often between coleagues and hierarchical superiors, thirdly, to a fairly flexible and fragmented organizational structure concerning the attribution and sharing of chores and eventually to the demands for productivity at health service, political interferences and administrative determinations. The adoption of defensive strategies to cope with the suffering is an inherent practice in health service, although workers often lack the perception of such strategies. The relationship logics between gender and work has demonstrated the demand for specific strategies in health services, mounting to a context of oblivion of biased situations which end up veiling reality which is not adequately noticed by the workers themselves.