Perceptions of Spanish nurses on economic crisis and the impacts on health care system

Abstract

Objective: to analyze the perceptions of Spanish nurses regarding the country’s economic crisis situation, and its impacts on nursing work, health system and population’s health. Methods: qualitative approach, with data collection using an internet-based questionnaire and individual in-depth interviews. Data were analyzed according to Thematic-Categorical Content Analysis, supported by Historical and Dialectical Materialism perspective. Results: the categories produced discuss themes as: cutbacks in health care and the consequences of workforce non-replacement and work overload; salary impact; care model changes; negative impacts on population health. The impact on population health and work was discussed, especially regarding vulnerable groups, as well as in assistance model reconfiguration, reinforcing the biomedical and assistance perspective.

Crisis, work and nursing: an ethnographic narrative of the coronavirus pandemic in Primary Care in Spain

“…The use of this expression in the text is made in reference to the precariousness of work and the support and defense of life, supporting health care in the difficult moment of the COVID-19 pandemic within the limits of its own professional health. It is we healthcare professionals, and nursing professionals in particular, who are in the "eye of the hurricane" within the health system, in frank disruption by successive political economic crises, seeking to give our best to fight the pandemic, but living hard with their overlapping and deepening impacts in the most serious health crisis of the last century caused by COVID-19 (33,(42)(43)47) . Despite the strength of values that support nurses' work in Primary Care in different countries, it is necessary to fight for decent conditions for nursing work through public systems that guarantee the universal right to health for the population.…”