Produção de cuidado aos usuários em atenção domiciliar: representações sociais do cuidador informal

Abstract

Home care is a long-standing practice and, in contemporary times, it presents itself as a powerful strategy for care that considers people's real health needs, recognizing the relevance of the social determination of the health-disease process in the process of producing health care. In this context, home care services and primary health care teams find the home to be a fertile lócus for providing unique and assertive health care to users/families in the territory. The objective of this research was to understand the social representations of informal caregivers about the care they provide to users under their responsibility as home caregivers. This is a qualitative, exploratory research, in light of the Theory of Social Representations, in which semi-structured interviews were used as a data collection technique, with a sample of 21 participants. For data processing, the IRaMuTeQ software (Interface de R pour les Analyses Multidimensionnelles de Textes et de Questionnaires), version 0.7, alpha 2, was used, according to the Descending Hierarchical Classification (CDH) and the Similarity Dendrogram, and data analysis was undertaken using the Thematic Content Analysis technique. Based on the words that were processed and analyzed, three categories were obtained: “Paths for home care”; “The true essence and subjectivity of care” and “Intramural ambiguity in the care production process”, which were represented in the 6 classes generated by the software. The results of this research served to understand the practice of home care, based on the figure of the informal home caregiver, and contributed to the improvement of care practices from the group studied, bringing significant impacts for the person providing care and the person being cared for.