A pandemia da COVID-19 e os impactos na saúde mental e bem-estar dos trabalhadores de saúde na linha de frente de Minas Gerais

Abstract

With more than 32 million cases and 674 thousand deaths in Brazil, the COVID-19 pandemic is already one of the biggest health crises in the country. With the exponential increase in the work of health professionals who acted on the front line of COVID-19 combat, the mental health of these professionals became to be a concern. Thus, the objective of this study is to understand the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on the well-being and mental health of nursing professionals who worked on the front line to combat the disease. Seven participants were selected for the study, six female nurses and one male nurse. For data collect, a semi-structured interview was used with guiding questions about work in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. From the analysis of the participants’ speech corpus using content analysis according to Bardin (1977), seven categories were identified, and the one that refers to the psychic suffering of professionals during the COVID-19 pandemic was the most mentioned by them, totaling 119 mentions. When analyzing all the categories together, issues related to the psychic, work, family and political spheres are observed. In this way, the study demonstrates that the context of the COVID-19 pandemic at work impacted several areas of the life of nursing professionals, accentuating the physical and mental exhaustion, illness and burnout already faced by the professional class. The results converge with the literature and the study contributes by bringing more debates to this topic, which still has few national research.