Abstract
Identify the barriers and facilitators of health advocacy to users delivered by nurses from the Family Health Strategy. Qualitative study carried out with nurses from the Family Health Strategy of a city in the south of Brazil. Study participants were 15 nurses, who were interviewed. The content of the interviews was recorded, transcribed and analyzed in the light of the discursive text analysis. Two categories emerged, one about the lack of organization at the workplace, bureaucracy and limitations to professional work in health environments, and another about the facilitating aspects to exercise advocacy both individually and collectively. When nurses, provided with technical, scientific and relational knowledge, are empowered to make decisions, they are not only supported by other professionals at work but also develop actions of health advocacy to users, thus qualifying the care delivered.
Highlights
Primary Health Care (PHC) provides to professional nurses a promising work space to develop community-oriented actions on health promotion and disease prevention. It expands the insertion of nurses, who usually take on the frontline in relation to other health professionals when they develop care, administrative and educational activities crucial to consolidate and strengthen the Family Health Strategy (FHS) in the scope of the Brazilian Unified Health System (SUS)(1)
Shortage of resources was pointed as a barrier that hinders actions of health advocacy by nurses at the FHS, since it hampers or even prevents the development or planning of such actions, demanding significant efforts to perform activities or even prevent them from happening
Among the barriers nurses found when fostering actions of health advocacy and users’ empowerment in PHC, there are impairments related to shortage of material and financial resources; unsuitable facilities that hinder carrying out activities with users; work overload added to the sharp bureaucratic demand; nurses’ lack of autonomy; traditional healthcare models that hinder the nurses’ political work in the community; and, lack of referral/counter-referral in services that interfere in health care continuity
Summary
Primary Health Care (PHC) provides to professional nurses a promising work space to develop community-oriented actions on health promotion and disease prevention. In addition to performing their care activities with excellence, nurses are expected to maximize the situations that lead them to work as political agents, pursuing changes as advocators of the users’ and community’s health[11]. This political view of nurses supports the work process innovation, advocating for individual and collective health[12]. Considering the aforementioned, the research issue was the lack of knowledge about the barriers and facilitators of health advocacy of users by FHS nurses
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