As condições de trabalho e o stress ocupacional de profissionais de saúde durante a COVID-19

In March 2020, the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 as a pandemic. Its appearance and propagation contributed to increase the challenges existent in the everyday life of healthcare workers, compelling a partnership between private and public sectors to optimize the response towards treatment of the disease in Portugal. Occupational stress, described as the fear or worry in being or transmitting the infection duo to the extensive working hours and lack of material and resources towards fighting the virus led the present investigation to aiming to analyse the perception of work conditions and levels of occupational stress experienced by healthcare workers in the public and private sectors during the pandemic. It’s a quantitative and transversal study contrived by 97 healthcare workers, associated with the public and private sector. The results revealed that even though the medium value of workload between sectors is similar, the professionals worked significantly more hours than the stipulated/planned. Likewise, the level of occupational stress among professionals from different contexts was similar. Lastly, it was concluded that the physical and material work conditions predict occupational stress, instead of the workload. This study demonstrates that it´s important that the health institutions, either private or public, provide the best material and physical work conditions to their healthcare workers, specially under the demands of the pandemic context.