Família e trabalhador/a de saúde na clínica médica: um estudo etnográfico sobre as interações

Abstract

The present research aims to understand the experience of illness and hospitalization for the family group from their integrants and healthcare workers who develop caring activity in the medical clinic of a public hospital within Bahia. Anchored in an interdisciplinary perspective, the research follows a qualitative approach, focused on participant observation, interviews and sensitive listening that supported the holding of interaction ethnography in the medical clinic. Participants were 14 families and 17 workers of the clinic, including accompanying family members who performed the activity, from 48 hours in the clinic, and excluding accompanying family members receiving income and private caregivers. Observations were carried out in the hospital lobby, in the hall, at the nursing station and in the wards, totaling eight months of systematic observation. Collected data were treated methodologically and epistemologically as narratives, within a biographical perspective, from the combination of obtained information, originating the "narratives of narratives”. Biographical focus support was possible on narrative (re)elaboration of the data collected, as evidenced by the lived experience as a whole. As ethnography results and from the understanding that the hospital is a setting of dramas, inter-family support network aspects were revealed, faith as a mobilizing force to face the illness and hospitalization, as well as a series of motivating situations of tensions and conflicts in the infirmary. The nurses' station has been presented as a place of corporatism expression, hierarchies, but also of jokes. Interactions analysis still points to the dimension of "care" involved in communicative action. Three important categories emerged from families’ narratives on the hospital follow-up experience: "follow-up and care as mutual comfort"; "follow-up and care as an act of love"; "follow-up and care as an obligation." Research indicates the importance of investments in new ethnographic studies in the hospital that involve the family, highlighting this group that integrates the hospital setting.