Le rôle des gardes-malades auprès des personnes en situation de handicap au centre hospitalo-universitaire d'Oran (Algérie)

Our approach was to try and better understand the roles of chose who are called “home nurses” in Algeria within a university medical centre such as Oran's. Our main objective was to describe the real contents of the activity of care realized by home nurses. Our second objective was to show how this type of activity reveals dysfunctions of a health system in crisis. On a methodological level, we chose to cross the data of the interview and those of the observations. In this socioanthropological context, it is the qualitative aspect of the analysis of the social practices of the home nurses who is rather privileged than the quantitative data. It seems to us that this approach can have a positive effect on the quality of the relation between nurse and doctor and on that of the quality of the care. Our study was based on the interview of nine people (eight women and one man), aged between 18 and 78 years old. At the end of our study, the term “home nurse” seemed inappropriate given the kind and amount of work done (realization, organization and management of care to the person in situation of handicap). The home nurse is, in the medical centre of Oran, the unexpected and contingent shape of the hospital. Home nurses work three jobs in complete anonymity: that of the nurse's aide for basic care, that of the hospital worker for the housework but also that of the nurse for the technical care.