Technological innovation and workloads among health care professionals: review of Latin-American literature

Abstract

The current intense process of technological innovation involves changes in the world of work and can impact the workers health. In this context, the objective of this study was to identify the Latin-American knowledge production concerning the influence of new technologies in health care professionals' workloads. An integrative review was carried out, with the selection criteria for these studies based upon the fact that they were in the form of articles, theses, or dissertations published in periodicals indexed within the LILACS database in the last five years and written in Portuguese, English, or Spanish. Eleven publications were found to meet the criteria mentioned above and were then analyzed according to their sources, the type of study, the objectives of the research, methodology employed, and the theoretical references utilized and results. The results of the study evidenced a greater number of publications originating from the Southern Region of Brazil, field research with a qualitative approach, studies carried out in public institutions and in the hospital environment. The findings show that studies about high technology and workloads are significant in health care Latin-American literature but there are not studies which approach the impact of the use of new technologies upon workloads among the sector's professionals.

Descriptores: Workload; Science, technology and society; Health personnel; Nursing; Medicine.