Trabalho em saúde: revisão sistemática da literatura brasileira

Abstract

All human activity is a productive act, it modifies something and produces something new. Work is seen as a process of mutual exchange and commitment, and throughout history, men and women have always been collectively involved in this process. Health work is mostly a collective institutional work, which is developed with characteristics of professional work and also of the partial division and Taylorist logic of work organization and management. This study aims to characterize the literature produced in Brazilian scientific journals about health work, from 1987 to November 2013. To this end, a survey was conducted in the Virtual Health Library (VHL), using the descriptor “Health Work”. A total of 221 articles were analyzed, categorized based on the following variables: year, keywords, study population, journals, Qualis, authors, region and educational institution, type and nature of research, data collection instruments, data analysis procedures and bibliographic references. There was a marked growth trend in the production of articles on health work between 2007 and 2009. Workers in Basic Health Units and Nursing workers were the populations most studied in the selected articles. This may be related to the importance of Primary Care in the Brazilian Health Care network. Among the five regions of Brazil, the Southeast region stood out with the largest number of first authors. The study allowed the systematization of scientific production on Health Work, indicating the main characteristics of this production, contributing to a reflection on the health work process in Brazil and the production of knowledge on working conditions and its organization.