Social representations of nurses regarding the care provided to HIV/aids patients: challenges, affections and representationnal constructions

The present study is concerned with the provision of care as well as with memories and social representations from nurses who worked in reference hospitals where HIV/aids patients were admitted to, in the city of Rio de Janeiro, from 1980 to 1991. It specifically aims to: Identify social memories related to nursing practices implemented by nurses and directed to HIV/aids patients in Rio de Janeiro; Describe nursing practices in the timespan aforementioned; Describe how nurses faced up to the epidemic in the professional context of the hospital where patients were being treated as well as regarding the social relationships that were established and, Analyse memories and social representations of care practitioners related to the nursing care provided to hospitalized HIV/aids patients in the decade following the onset of the epidemic. This descriptive field study has a qualitative approach based on the theoretical presuppositions of memory proposed by Sá in its interface with the theory of social representations from the field of Social Psychology. It has been conducted with the collaboration of 30 nurses who worked in facilities considered to be reference hospitals where HIV-infected patients were treated at the time. Data were collected by means of a semi-structured interview and from the subjects’ watching of 12 fac-símiles randomly chosen from the mass media. Subjects were predominantly females from 51 to 60 years of age. The main findings suggest that the social memory of nursing care is constructed from different representational objects (nursing care, aids and biosafety), instances of social memory (personal, public, practice, collective, common, verbal historical and documentational historical) as well as from several elements encompassed in that memory (care environment, family and work relationships, among others)...