Health care work in times of pandemic.

Transformations in the work process and coping strategies in nurses from the private subsector of La Plata

Abstract

In this work I will analyse the transformations in the health care tasks carried out by nurses from private clinics located in the city of La Plata, during the special context of the pandemic. I will emphasize the changes in the organization of the work process, the restructuring and adaptation of the different services and the inclusion of new hygiene and patient care protocols. I will point out that, although as a result of the health emergency, different problems related to the organization of tasks emerged, they were intertwined with pre-existing conditions of precariousness in the healthcare establishments of the private subsector. In this sense, I will argue that the nursing workers built a series of group and daily strategies to face these problems in a scenario of great uncertainty and pressure on their work. In methodological terms, I will use the empirical corpus built from in-depth interviews with nurses from general hospitalization clinics in La Plata carried out between September 2020 and June 2021. Specifically, the data comes from the PISAC-COVID 19 national research project “The Nursing and professional health care during the COVID-19 pandemic and post-pandemic (Argentina, 20th and 21st centuries)" and a doctoral thesis in progress.