Percepções dos profissionais de saúde acometidos pela COVID-19: Impactos na vida profissional e pessoal

Abstract

Healthcare professionals are a risk group for COVID-19 because they provide direct assistance to contaminated patients. Moreover, the professional performance under enormous stress, due to the severity of the patients, as well as the long working hours and work overload, the scarcity of personal protective equipment, and the physical and mental exhaustion, contribute to the increased vulnerability of these professionals. The objective of this study was to analyze the perceptions of healthcare professionals from a federal teaching hospital about the impacts of contamination by COVID-19 on their professional and personal lives. This is a cross-sectional, descriptive study, with a qualitative approach, whose data collection was performed through a questionnaire for characterization of the participants and an interview with guiding questions on the theme. The analysis of the statements was carried out using the Collective Subject Discourse technique. Twenty-five healthcare professionals who were contaminated by COVID-19 in a Federal Teaching Hospital in the city of Uberaba/MG participated in this research. The DSC was built from the key expressions obtained in the individual statements and identification of similar central ideas and distributed into two categories: impacts caused by COVID-19 in professional life and impacts caused by COVID-19 in personal life. The impacts of the contamination by COVID-19 on professional life included the constant feelings of fear and anxiety; the post-COVID symptoms, such as difficulty in concentration, slowness of thoughts; improvements in biosafety procedures; greater concern with the quality of care, with patient safety, and recovery; the need for continued education and professional training and the importance of recognition and professional appreciation of health workers. Regarding the impacts on the personal life of the professionals, the fear of personal and family contamination; feelings of fear, despair, insecurity about recovery from COVID-19 or the possibility of dying; concern about the financial costs of the treatment; the establishment of empathic relationships with the patients and the importance of self-worth in the face of the fragility of life stood out. The information obtained deserves attention from health managers, so that actions to prevent the illness of this population and the adoption of measures for the promotion and protection of integral health can be implemented, for a better quality of life for these professionals.