Online in the puerperium: interactions and dynamics of a virtual group
puerperium, support network, virtual support, coronavirus
The puerperium is a phase of a woman's life marked by changes, physical and biopsychosocial challenges. Thus, the mother-child binomial can be characterized as a particularly vulnerable group in the face of the current world pandemic situation caused by the new coronavirus. The present study, the object of this qualification, seeks to better understand the impact of the pandemic on the puerperium, being an excerpt from a larger study that followed the interactions of a virtual group of mothers during the period from January to June 2020. This is a qualitative research, with an exploratory character, which analyzed the interactions of a virtual Whatsapp group, composed of 9 puerperal women, users of the basic health services of six Family Health Strategies in the Municipality of Currais Novos / RN. The corpus resulting from the interactions was prepared, revised and corrected in Word and, subsequently, submitted to the Descending Hierarchical Classification Analysis of the IRAMUTEQ software, followed by content analysis according to Bardin. The dimension now analyzed was called Health Care, comprising 25.5% of units of elementary context. In the group analyzed, the COVID-19 pandemic culminated in weakening and precarious care flows, resulting in a series of difficulties that mothers encountered in accessing basic public health services, as well as the need to develop other strategies to respond to this scenario. In this perspective, the participants revealed that the virtual support provides bonds of friendship and strengthens the support network necessary to face the difficulties of the puerperium from the exchange of experiences.