Shared practices among primary health care workers: A time-motion study

Shared activities by health workers in meeting health needs are crucial to improve the health population, patient experience, quality of life of health teams members and the effectiveness of care.

To identify the activities shared by Primary Health Care (PHC) team workers, whether multiprofessional or uniprofessional.

A descriptive study was, thus, carried out, based on the time-motion technique, in São Paulo-Brazil. Data collection was carried out from 2021 to 2022, through direct observations of workers, family health teams (FHT), oral health teams (OHT) and multiprofessional teams (MultiT). The frequency rates of both activities and time of shared practices and the distribution of workers involved in information exchanges were considered.

A total of 93 workers were observed, recording 21,936 activities (157,653 minutes). Of these, 72.90% were individual activities and 27.10%, shared (36.1% uni-professional and 63.9% multiprofessional). Shared activities represented 26.26% of the time. Dentists presented 60.8% of their activities in the shared modality, uni-professionally (99.26%). Concerning FHT, nurses were most dedicated to shared practices (33.09%) and exchanged information the most with others. According to team practices, the greatest amount of time dedicated to shared practices was spent by FHT (80%), followed by MultiT (71%) and OHT (65%).

Multiprofessional work in PHC is evident as a precursor to interprofessional practice. In this sense, studies and reflections on the way in which PHC indicators have been monitored and evaluated, which mainly refer to individual activities, are required.