Circunstâncias geradoras de medo em profissionais de enfermagem do Brasil no contexto da pandemia da Covid-19

Abstract

The context of COVID-19 made it possible for professionals in the nursing category to be in a state of alert and emotional distress, and they were afraid to perform procedures on suspected or confirmed patients of COVID-19. Objective: To understand the fear-generating circumstances experienced by nursing professionals in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. Method: Qualitative, exploratory study, developed in the five geographic regions of Brazil, through interviews in a virtual environment with 215 professionals, between April and December 2020. The data were processed by the IRaMuTeQ® software and analyzed in the light of the theoretical-philosophical framework of Phenomenological Sociology. Results: Most females mean 37.9 years old, married, white and mixed-race, nursing technicians (15.5%) and nurses (84.5%), working in public institutions. The textual corpus was divided by the software into 3 classes and subclasses: fear of personal and family life circumstances, related to the risk of self-contamination, transmission, loss of family members, co-workers and life itself; fear of exposure and social distancing in the face of the feeling of loneliness arising from social distancing, despite understanding that loneliness implies the absence of emotional connections with the people around, and not associated with physical distance; fear of subjective and objective working conditions, related to insecurity in the face of precarious working conditions, such as physical infrastructure, biosafety inputs, human resources, technical unpreparedness, lack of training and qualifications to take on highly complex care units, such as the needs to acquire and improve technical-scientific knowledge. Conclusion: The circumstances that generate fear are multiple and are processed in the physical, social, psychological and work dimensions, and it marks the lack of knowledge about the disease. The interpretations of the everyday world are based on a stock of previous experiences and transmitted by our predecessors, if they didn't have them (didn't live a pandemic) they can hardly deal with the current problem.