The psychological distress of community health agents and its relations to working conditions

Abstract

This work intends to analyse some aspects that, when they are present in community health agents' working conditions and relationships, can be linked to the onset of psychological distress in these professionals. Consequently, they can impede them from having an active and mediating attitude, both for the guarantee of the right to health and for the operation of the health care services. For the conceptual design and characterisation of the phenomenon in question, we based ourselves on the knowledge produced by Dejours, who has offered, in the last decades, important contributions to the understanding of the Psychodynamics of Work and its consequences. The research was carried out during one intervention in a health care unit of the Family Health Strategy, in the city of Rondonópolis, State of Mato Grosso (Central-western Brazil), and for data collection we adopted the following procedures: talk groups and open interviews with community health agents, observation of their work and open interviews with users of the health care units. The appraisal of the results started from the written register and analysis of the discourses produced during the activities and it was performed through the construction and analysis of categories. We consider that there are several situations that characterise the community health agent's work overload in many spheres. Two consequences have been identified: one is related to the loss of the profession's specificity, and the other is associated with the insalubrity of working conditions and relationships. Both of them seem to be related to the production of psychological distress in community health agents, which can be minimized with the empowerment of these professionals.