Understanding the Process of Work in Healthcare
Work in Healthcare
The Work Process
Work involves producing goods and services with exchange value. Healthcare workers produce services valuable to their employers. The work process comprises:
- Workforce: Agents whose presence and actions enable the work process.
- Purpose of Work: Transforming raw materials or addressing needs. In healthcare, the object of work is human health needs.
- Tools: Historically constituted instruments that enhance intervention on the object of work. In healthcare, these include material tools (equipment, supplies, medications) and non-material tools (knowledge).
The health work process encompasses the daily practices of healthcare professionals involved in producing and consuming health services. It involves the microscopic dimension of care work, incorporating knowledge, technical conduct, and social relationships. This process aims to intervene on vital biological and psychological values assigned social and historical significance. The consumption in this process is the care itself—the work—not its product. Health work is realized through the relationship between professional and user/patient in specific settings where health products are created.
Healthcare Work as a Service
Healthcare is a service based on an intense interpersonal relationship. It focuses on people, not material objects. The consumer (patient) contributes to the work process, providing necessary values and collaborating with the provider to achieve results.
Technology in Healthcare Work
Technology encompasses more than just machines and instruments. It represents the body of knowledge applied to a specific industry. In healthcare, the workers (nurses, doctors, dentists, psychologists, etc.) are the producers of health, interacting with the consumer (user) while producing procedures that the user consumes simultaneously.
This producer-consumer interaction highlights a fundamental characteristic of health work: its relational nature. It occurs through the relationship between worker and user, whether individual or collective.
Types of Technologies in Healthcare
- Material Technologies: Machinery and tools.
- Non-material Technologies: Knowledge and skills possessed by healthcare workers, central to the debate on work and health production.
- Hard Technologies: Pre-programmed technologies embedded in machines and tools for specific product creation.
- Light-heavy Technologies: Technical knowledge (hard part) combined with the worker’s specific application (light part), varying based on individual work styles and patient care approaches.