Primary health care cleaners in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic: between invisibility and essentiality

This article presents the trajectory of primary health care (PHC) sanitation staff in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, with the inherent challenges and difficulties involved. It starts with the question: how did hygiene workers express the meanings of their experience of working as hygienists in the pandemic scenario? The objective of this study was to analyze the experience of sanitation workers regarding working as hygienists during the COVID-19 pandemic. A qualitative approach was adopted, based on the phenomenology of everyday life and ethnomethodology, to explore the work of these agents in the PHC context. The research was conducted in three Health Districts (HD) in the city of Salvador - Bahia, where two Family Health Units (FHU) were selected in each HD. The data was collected through in-depth semi-structured interviews, both remote and in-person. The results revealed the existence of the binomial of invisibility versus essentiality in the daily lives of hygiene workers in PHC, in other words even though they are considered essential, they do not achieve visibility and professional and social recognition.