Background: The topic right to refuse to do hazardous work/to be exposed to serious and imminent risks is herein presented as the central and fundamental axis on issues associated with workers' health and safety.
Objective: Investigating how the topic right to refuse to do hazardous work/be exposed to serious and imminent risks may be used as condition and strategy to manage work in the Surgical Center of a hospital.
Methods: The research methodology focused on establishing dialogue among Activity-centered Ergonomics (Ergonomic Workplace Analysis -EWA), Ergology, Action-Research and Ethnography.
Background: Risk management analysis at work makes it possible to find individual and collective experiences of recognition and hierarchization of risks in view of the specificities of labor situations and the complex and contradictory application of the right to refuse in health work, whose space and technique are still in a deep structural transformation.
Objective: To investigate how work organization impacts on the daily life of nursing care, in a general hospital surgical center, (un)enabling individual and collective risk management strategies in the context analyzed and how the right to refuse can be appropriate as a condition and strategy for work management.
Methods: Ergonomics (Work Ergonomic Analysis) was used to bring about the actual work activity and Ergology for epistemological deepening, whose research approach took place in a surgical center with four registered nurses.