Overworked, underpaid Brazil nurses risk lives to care for patients
by Eugenia Logiuratto
Hans Bossan is 40 hours into his 72-hour workweek, but despite his marathon nursing shifts and the pandemic claiming an alarming number of his colleagues’ lives in Brazil, he barely looks tired.
Bossan works three jobs to provide for his wife and two-year-old daughter — at two different hospitals and a mobile emergency unit.
Double and triple shifts like his are not unusual in Brazil, where the average salary for nurses, nursing assistants and health care technicians is just 3,000 reals ($600) a month for a 30- to the 44-hour workweek.
The coronavirus pandemic, which has thrust health care workers into the spotlight around the world, has in Brazil also highlighted the plight of nurses, who often face bad working conditions and are now getting sick and dying from COVID-19 at a startling rate.
“Nursing was always an overworked profession, and this pandemic has just made things worse,” said Bossan, 41.
“We’re highly undervalued. Nurses deal directly with patients, with the virus, we’re on the front lines of the war. But not everyone realizes that” he told AFP at his home in a poor neighborhood on the eastern outskirts of Rio de Janeiro.
Nurses have been hit particularly hard as Brazil has become the latest epicenter in the pandemic, with 39,680 deaths, behind only the United States and Britain.
Around 18,000 nurses in Brazil have been infected with COVID-19, and at least 181 have died — among the highest numbers in the world, according to the International Council of Nurses.
Last month, nurses protested in the capital, Brasilia, against the poor working conditions they blame for contributing to their colleagues’ deaths.
Brazil accounts for nearly one-third of the 600 deaths among nurses and other health professionals registered worldwide by the International Council of Nurses, though the organization says many countries are not doing enough to track the real number. (AFP)
