Abstract
Spanish healthcare workers’ professional identity is intricately associated with the idea of vocation, among others values. This attitude has become even more marked during the current COVID-19 pandemic—during which these professionals have endured a gruelling workload that has tested the limits of their physical and mental strength. The objective of this study is to open a debate on the symbolic dimensions of identity and culture among healthcare professionals (mainly doctors and nurses), analysing the factors that, on the one hand, might reinforce this symbolic system or, on the other, might question it or cause it to be restructured. The study follows an anthropological perspective, with the thematic content analysis of twenty-two in-depth interviews with primary healthcare professionals. The results show the need to dissect the symbolic and structural factors underpinning anxiety and fear in medical professional performance during the COVID-19 pandemic. These have a significant impact on the current model of medical practice and its most visible and worrying consequence, continuous occupational distress. The conclusions suggest that these models need to be reviewed since there is a notorious dissonance between their strengths and weaknesses.
Highlights
Healthcare professionals have dealt with previous episodes of pandemic in the recent past
They are used to working in complex situations, as well as anticipating a variety of scenarios in order to improve their responsiveness in crisis situations—such as the one created by the current COVID-19 pandemic
Instead of a thematic content analysis based on predetermined categories, we have conducted an inductive content analysis—identifying emerging categories from the analysis of the content expressed during the interviews (Aberláez Gómez and Goñi 2016)
Summary
Healthcare professionals have dealt with previous episodes of pandemic in the recent past. They are used to working in complex situations, as well as anticipating a variety of scenarios in order to improve their responsiveness in crisis situations—such as the one created by the current COVID-19 pandemic. The infrastructural and material factors underlying and driving epidemics are diverse—and are due to interactions among species, and social issues (Hoffman and Oliver-Smith 2002; Le Coq 2019; Lynteris and Keck 2018; Caduff 2020). For this reason, Horton (Horton 2020) has suggested the term “syndemic”
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