The article discusses the reconfiguration of work in Primary Health Care (PHC) based on changes implemented by the Brazilian federal government since 2017, which have aggravated precarious work conditions. Methodologically it is inspired by Michael Burawoy’s expanded case ethnography, dialoguing with studies on productive restructuring and New Public Management (NGP), linked to the concept of difficulty. Participant observation and semi-structured interviews with workers from a health team from a basic unit of the Unified Health System (SUS) in Rio de Janeiro were used. Difficulty has been characterized as: the constant demand for changes in the organization of daily work and overload due to the extensive workday, and the demand for reaching established goals despite the work conditions. This paper emphasized the need to continue analyzing the reconfiguration of health work, considering the impacts of the Constitutional Amendment 95 (2016); the labor reform (2017); and the COVID-19 pandemic.
Primary Health Care; Health Work Management; Difficulty; Precarization; Productive Restructuring