‘You are applauded but it’s not enough’: symbolic and material recognition of nursing during COVID-19 pandemic in the province of Buenos Aires

Abstract

The health crisis caused by the COVID-19 pandemic positioned the health system at the center of the public scene and, inevitably, health workers acquired unusual visibility. For nursing, this leading role in public discourse was a real novelty. Based on the analysis of the national and local press, in this article we reconstruct the narratives that the media used to portray the work carried out by the nursing teams. Then, based on in-depth interviews and a self-administered survey obtained from the PISAC project, we looked at nursing staff's experiences during the pandemic in the south area of Buenos Aires province. We observed that although the public discourse provided a share of symbolic recognition for the professionals, the construction of a heroic story about their work buried their demands in a context of deterioration of the material and subjective conditions in which they carried out their work.