Trabalho & maternidade: há conflito para a profissional de saúde? realidade de profissionais de saúde de hospitais públicos da Bahia

Abstract

Nowadays, women are getting more and present in the working world. Maternity is no longer their only identity. Some women express their non-adherence to the maternity project, even though the majority still wants it. To develop a professional project, to have a profession, an income and autonomy are as important to them as the choice of having children. Women are developing a conciliation procedure of the productive and the reproductive work. Women who are healthcare professionals, among others, face this reality. In the healthcare field, and especially in hospitals, it is possible to find specific working conditions as shifts of 12 and 24 hours, including holidays, weekends and special dates, excessive service demand, people in crisis and suffering. This particular set of circumstances poses more challenges for the conciliation between labor activities and motherhood. This research discusses how professional health care women who work in the emergency service of public hospitals experience the conciliation procedure between work and maternity. The general objective was to analyze the conciliation dynamic of the healthcare work and maternity among emergency professionals of public Bahian hospitals. The specific objectives were: analyze the working conditions of the healthcare professionals in public emergency rooms and their family context; unveil the strategies used by them to deal with emergency work and maternity; identify the subjective place occupied by these professionals as workers, mothers and women between healthcare work and maternity. The quantitative method was chosen for this research, developing interviews with healthcare professionals acting in the emergency assistance of public hospitals for a period equal or superior to a year, and mothers of small children. The responses were analyzed by the content analysis technique The participants authorized the interviews through a free and informed consent, with a previous acceptance document from two hospitals, one in the interior of the state and one in the capital. All ethical requirements were observed. The results are presented in the form of articles, the first of them being a literature review on maternity postponing and its relation to a fall in the fertility rate. The articles that followed were built from the guiding questions and the content of the interviews. One is about the strategies of conciliation between work in the emergency room and maternity. Other article discusses how these women cope with maternity in a daily basis. The following article deals with the participation of husbands\partners in the conciliation of the productive and the reproductive work and the last article analyzes the support network used by the women. In the conclusion, it was possible to verify the difficulties in the conciliation exercise, weather due to working conditions and working organization in hospitals that are still very rigid and not yet properly adapted to the needs of women or to the dissatisfaction with the little participation of the spouses. The spouses insist in the discourse of the domestic care of house and children as a feminine role, fruit of the sexual division of work, present in the Brazilian context. It was also possible to identify the guilt felt by the women for being absent while longing to spend more time with their children, being responsible for the feeding, education and hygiene care, counting with the support of some spouses, their mothers, some grandmothers and other family women, hiring house maids, not using day care institutions and other equipment disposed by public policies. The study concludes that more support for the feminist movements should be given, in the defense of a new labor division, with women and men in equal condition in both productive and reproductive labor environments. Finally, the relevance and actuality of the debate about public hospitals working conditions stands out, since it is essentially performed by women in a precarious environment.