“Nursing takes care of people, but who takes care of Nursing?”

covid-19 in a public hospital in the Metropolitan Region of Rio de Janeiro

Abstract

This paper presents some reflections about the work of the Nursing team in combating covid-19 in a public hospital in Itaboraí - RJ. For the realization of this text, the ethnographic and participant observation method of one of the authors who works there as a Nursing Technician was used. Based on the readings of Van Gennep and Mary Douglas, we believe that health workers experience a kind of constant liminality in their daily lives, located between two worlds, two physical states and two temporalities: between the hospital and the street, between health and disease, between vulnerability and power, between the "normal" past and the new "pandemic" present / future. In addition, the drama of the possibility of the “lonely” death of patients was observed, based on a debate with Norbert Elias and the social role of Nursing in this liminal process between life and death.