The hospital as a "clinical reality": an understanding based on the interaction of nursing employees andfamilies in a multiple-patient room in a maternity ward

Abstract

This study is a qualitative investigation which try to understand in what way nursing professionals involved with the birthing process perceive a multiple-patient hospital room as a clinical reality, during the processes of admission, stay, and release of the families. The theoretical support for this study was based in the conception of the clinical reality within a symbolic perspective, taken from the area of Anthropology in Health Care, and in the conception of the Maternity Ward as a "Total Institution". Two ethnographical techniques were applied in the collection of the data, using participative observation as the principal source and ethnographic interviews as the complementary source of data. Nineteen (19) nursing employees and forty-two (42) family members were involved as the subjects of the study. The data analysis was constructed based upon "ethno-nursing". The results point out that nursing generally conceives the hospital's clinical reality, almost exclusively within the parameters of biomedicine and the separatist barriers within the hospital and the outside world. This conception is identified from norms, work shifts, routines, and patterns of conduct, all of which include the participation of the families from the moment they enter the multiple-patient room until they leave. In counterpoint, the data also reveal that nursing workers promote come small breaches in resistance to the established hegemony, facilitating the promotion of more unified and therapeutic interactions with the families.