NURSES’ PERCEPTIONS ABOUT MANAGEMENT IN PRIMARY HEALTH CARE IN PEDRO CANARIO CITY

Abstract

The primary health care, pillar of the health system organization, acts in a regionalized, continuous and systematic way, integrating preventive and curative courses of actions for the individuals and their community through teamwork. The nurses, members of this teamwork effort, focus their work on the care and use of management tools to develop it - to direct, coordinate, organize and plan their own actions and their team’s in order to ensure the smooth functioning of the system. This study aims to analyze the perceptions of nurses working in primary health care in Pedro Canary City in Espírito Santo State, about the nursing management work. This is a qualitative descriptive study, whose data were collected through interviews with twelve nurses. Those interviews had guiding questions. Their responses were analyzed by thematic content. The categories identified in the empirical setting were: Work Meaning; Work Aspects in Health Care; Management Meaning, and Health and Management Perceptions. Their reports reveal that they have a full understanding of the value of their work and of teamwork and the importance of attaining excellence in health care service providing. In spite of that it was also found that there are gaps and biases in the understanding of the management process, causing it to be understood as simply coordinating actions.