Health work and research: notes on the invisibility of technical work

摘要

> In the past decades, the investigation of the different types of health work has become a central topic in the field of social research in health. In part, this increase is associated with the proposals for the reorganization of the health services, with the development of new professions and with the knowledge that there have been significant changes in the contents of health work. Many suggest that there are correlations between these changes and the acceleration in the process of incorporation of new technologies in the health services, thus bringing social health research much closer to the scientific and technological fields of investigation in the area of health. To the detriment of this convergence, few studies have explored the possible interfaces between the dynamics of health work and that of technological research and development. In this sense, for the purpose of social analyses, technicians and researchers are usually not counted as health workers. Starting from a diagnosis of the invisibility of technical work in health research laboratories, we have tried to investigate the technicians' activities and the processes leading to the attribution of their various duties. Through the description of a female technician's work, we have gathered elements about the work organization in a laboratory, the internal qualification processes and the relationship with researchers.