SERVIÇO SOCIAL E CUIDADOS PALIATIVOS: concepções e desafios de assistentes sociais que atuam em equipes especializadas do Hospital do Câncer do Maranhão

Abstract

Palliative care is a modality of care in the health area that seeks to guarantee a dignified death, through adequate pain treatment, respect for the natural co urse of the disease and the adoption of strategies that can improve the quality of life and preserve autonomy, freedom and dignity of users. The work must be carried out by a multidisciplinary team with an interdisciplinary approach, in which the social worker stands out, who is responsible for understanding the individuals in their entirety and facing the expressions of the social issue. In 2018, palliative care was regulated as a Public Policy in Brazil, this occurs in an unfavorable situation for policies aimed at the social welfare of the population, as the Brazilian State has been adopting neoliberalism as an economic, political and ideological system, with this, it has progressively taken responsibility for the social area and transferred burdens to the family, civil society and the market, offering the population fragmented, selective and focused social policies, thus facilitating the process of precariousness in the social security system. Given this context, this research sought to investigate the conceptions and challenges of social workers in the face of the current reality and the demands that arise through Palliative Care Services, when the social worker is expected to have a critical view about the social processes in which they are inserted. The results obtained were as follows: the culture of individualism prevails in the contemporary man's relationship with death; the chronically ill at imminent risk of death suffers from various processes of social exclusion, so palliative care emerges as an alternative to provide some kind of dignity and quality care in the end-of-life phase, but the terminally ill can also be useful to capitalism when it becomes a commodity, generator of wealth for capital; the Palliative Care Policy is configured as a field of disputes between capital and work, and among social workers, a technical view of the Palliative Care Policy lacks an understanding of class relations, political decisions and the global process prevails. of capitalism.