Da solidão à cooperação: estratégias de enfrentamento de trabalhadores de enfermagem de unidades de terapia intensiva

Abstract

INTRODUCTION: In the nursing work in intensive care, there are daily situations that can cause insatisfaction and suffering, requiring the development of confrontation strategies, individual or collective, to health maintenance. OBJECTIVE: To know the strategies developed by Intensive Care Unit nursing workers to maintain health and quality of life. METHOD: Descriptive qualitative study, executed with 11 nursing workers of Adult and Neonatal Intensive Care Units, during June of 2019, in a large hospital in the South of Brazil. The data were produced after acceptance by local Board of Ethics, through semi-structured interviews and were submitted to content thematic analysis. RESULTS: From the analysis emerged three categories: “Individual confrontation strategies used by nursing workers in the ICU”, built and practiced individually from situations of stress; “The work loneliness: the inefficiency of the spaces for the care and listening of ICU nursing workers”, showed mismatches between the therapeutic spaces offered by the institution and the demands of the workers; “From loneliness to cooperation: collective strategies as a way to face suffering at work”, formed by the group of workers, stood out as a protective factor of greater effectiveness for well-being. CONCLUSION: Workers use confrontation strategies in their daily work. Most of them are individual stretegies, but with no potential for transforming the causal factors. Collective strategies have proved to be more effective in organizing the work process and strengthening the group, due to the absence of therapeutic spaces.