The work context and occupational health: An ethnographic study in a university hospital, Southeast Brazil

The Occupational Health is an area of public health which has as its object of study and intervention the relationship between work and health. With an eye to discuss the relationship between contexts’s work and occupational health focusing in the psychological distress and weariness concept’s in a university hospital, Southeast Brazil. This context is marked by medicalization, discipline and a system of this hegemonic power in their practices and speeches, and plays the process of capital accumulation and symbolic reproduction, essential to the industrial world. The work processes, it developed, are stressful. Expose the professional to emotional and physical experiences exhausting; situations of pain, suffering and death; feelings of impotence; and need of agility and speed. There are also situations that require an emotional support, from the patients and family members. It’s understood that mental and behavior disorders related to the work result, not of individual factors, but of the context’s work in interaction with the body and psychic apparatus of workers. In the case of the workers in health, the levels of attention and concentration required for the tasks, combined with the level pressure exerted by the organization of work, can create tension, fatigue and burn-out. This works conditions also contribute to considerables rates of suicide and drug abuse in general. The partial results of this ethnography has show the existence of luminal spaces in a hospital unit with purposes to promote sociability and subjectivity of the experience of the health work in a dialectical construction meanings (individual – social). This space comprises a live dimension, constantly charging, where people interpret, construct and manipulate the social reality. Include this knowledge on the live world in the public health policies become relevant to an integrative and interdisciplinary performance.