WEEKLY WORKLOAD FOR NURSES IN BRAZIL: CHALLENGES TO PRACTICE THE PROFESSION

Abstract The study had the goal of presenting the distribution of nurses in the job market with a weekly workload greater than or equal to forty hours according to the regions of Brazil and the kind of workplace (whether in the private or public sectors). It was a cross-sectional study, conducted between 10 and 27 of February 2017, with on-line data from the medical-sanitary researches conducted in 2002, 2005 and 2009 by the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics. We analyzed a total of 179,337 nurses in the 3 evaluated years. We compared their proportions according to each geographical region of Brazil and the workplace using Pearson’s Chi-squared test (α = 5%). Nursing was the only college-level healthcare occupation that presented a larger and increasing proportion of professionals with a weekly workload greater than or equal to 40 hours (p