A critical perspective on institutional violence against hospitalized children: Testimonies by health professionals and family members.

The purpose of this study is to understand institutional violence (IV) in the relationships between health professionals, hospitalized children, and family members. This is a qualitative study developed at the pediatric inpatient unit of a university hospital in the city of Salvador, Bahia, Brazil. The research participants consisted of 39 health professionals who specialized in pediatrics and 10 family members of hospitalized children. Semi-structured interviews were the method used for data collection. Using discourse analysis as a basis and taking a Foucauldian perspective, the researchers observed that the expressions of IV could be traced to abusive power relations within the system. We found four discursive forms within the data set: communication problems as IV, violence through inattention and neglect, violence as an action and consequent materialization on the body, and psychological violence as a submission mechanism. Based on these findings, we argue that professionals, managers, the scientific community, and users might be able to better guarantee the safety of children by recognizing IV and effectively intervening in it.

Discourse and manipulation: Nursing in question.

The history of Brazilian nurses is marked by several challenges, in part resulting from discontinuous and fragile activity boundaries among the health professions that share the same work objective in care services. A field of constant disputes, the Brazilian health system, was the target of a lawsuit filed by the Federal Council of Medicine that temporarily suspended nurses' activities in primary care. This study aimed to demonstrate the manipulative discourse present in the text of the injunction request by medical doctors against legislation by the Brazilian Federal Government in 2017. This is a qualitative and documental study that used the theoretical-methodological framework of critical discourse studies based on Teun Van Dijk's analytical categories. The results pointed to manipulative discourse through a polarization between manipulators' good qualities and intentions and the bad qualities of nurses and Brazilian primary care policies; episodic manipulation by the presentation of documental and historical evidence of the submission of nursing roles; and social manipulation marked by strong emotional appeal. The study demonstrated that manipulative discourse extrapolated linguistic categories in the form of ideology and history.