Impactos da pandemia da COVID19 no processo de trabalho: percepções de agentes comunitários de saúde de uma cidade da macrorregião Jequitinhonha

Abstract

The COVID19 pandemic has transformed and still affects the daily lives of society and especially health services around the world. Primary Health Care (PHC), the gateway to Brazilian health system, relies on Community Health Workers (CHWs), a category of workers responsible for health promotion, disease prevention and health surveillance actions. Despite the importance of these professionals, CHWs are often less remembered in the work process and are the category most likely not to be protected by five-year prevention, understood as the care of health professionals in order to provide appropriate care to the population to which they provide this service. Studying the impacts of the COVID19 pandemic from the perspective of the CHWs can help identify specific actions for this group, within the scope of the worker's health policy, alerting managers and family health teams. The objective of this research is to analyze the perception of CHWs in the municipality of Serro (MG) of the impact caused by the COVID19 pandemic on their work process from the perspective of five-year prevention. This is a qualitative, descriptive and exploratory study, conducting semi-structured interviews with 7 ACSs from the PHC in the municipality in question. The interviews were analyzed using Bardin's content analysis method, and categorized into changes in the work process, access to health services and digital technology; and access to information. Category changes in the work process is subdivided into 3 subcategories: sanitary barriers and the work of the CHWs; home visits during the pandemic, and new attributions and new protocols related to the pandemic. The analysis of the interviews revealed that the CHWs directly contributed to the control of COVID19 cases; revealed the urgency of establishing permanent education spaces, especially in the presence of a public health emergency, being able to contemplate the access to true information by the CHWs, guaranteeing the quality of health education; revealed that the use of digital technologies is important when expanding access to health services, and therefore measures must be taken to ensure that the working hours of the CHWs are not extrapolated, which is one of the precautions for the well-being of this category.