Families in the overnight stay unit of the hospital: between informal and instituted

Abstract

This study uses a comparative approach, as well as two already concluded ethnographies, to achieve its objective of identifying how families perceive their insertion into the overnight stay unit in a hospital and how they are perceived by the health care team, considering the rules and regulations of the institutional culture. The results obtained show that teams and families get closer or more distant depending on whether there's agreement or disagreement regarding the hospital's governing rules. Although families, in many situations, subject themselves to the regulations imposed by the hospital and the health care team, they also use individual and collective resistances in order to confront the regulatory mechanisms. The results contribute to increase the comprehension of this theme, both for the health care team and for the practice of family nursing, especially in the sense of recognizing the family as an active, responsible, and co-participatory unit within intra-hospital care.