Quando os médicos des-cansam: compreendendo o sentido que médicos de um hospital público dão ao tempo livre, trabalho e lazer

Abstract

As medicine has become increasingly scientific and technology-driven, medical care costs have increased and physicians had to specialize more and more, while working conditions have deteriorated for most of them. Because of the country s health policies, a vast majority of physicians took jobs in public hospitals where they do day and night duty shifts. Although salaries are low in the public sector, their tenure and labor rights are assured. In order to earn enough to meet their needs, a large part of these physicians work long hours, in day and night shifts, often times with no possibility of resting or engaging in leisure activities in their free time. This research focuses on physicians leisure. It was designed to understand how a group of physicians working in a public high-tech children s hospital in the city of São Paulo use their free time for leisure, and especially what their understanding of leisure is. Those physicians were asked to fill out a questionnaire and mark the number of working hours and the number of hours dedicated to other activities such as sleeping, resting, being with their families, and especially leisure considering two situations: a typical week and an atypical week. With this data in hand the author contacted seven physicians and long interviews were conducted to discuss the topic, i.e. leisure and physicians. Six of these seven physicians are pediatricians who passed an open competition and work duty shifts at the hospital s emergency room. One is a female plastic surgeon at the hospital where she also works as a volunteer. To analyze the interviews a specific methodology for qualitative research was used which is based on Heidegger s hermeneutic ontology. Based on the quantitative research the author concluded that although physicians believed they had leisure time this was not borne out by the facts. The data obtained in the qualitative research in turn allowed the author to conclude that for the group interviewed enjoying leisure time or not was directly related with the history or background of each one of them. For many of them leisure was yet another form of work, that is, it followed the same type of capitalistic logic, the logic of the perpetuum mobile of production. Leisure was also dependent on their availability to engage in a certain type of activity that could be considered as leisure or not. It also became apparent in the interviews that the physicians of this group had no difficulty in thinking about their leisure, although they were surprised with the topic at first. One last conclusion was that for this group of physicians leisure was not always equated with quality of life, or with pleasure or relaxation