O Serviço Social e o tema da morte em ambientes hospitalares

The insertion of social work in hospital institutions is widely recognized in the history of the profession in Brazil. In the field of healthcare, hospitals have been consolidated as spaces for the intervention of social workers, who daily face a very sensitive issue that is still little debated in the professional literature: death. This theme is present as an object of professional intervention, both in the reception of the demands of users and their families and social support networks during end-of-life processes, and in the guidance of bureaucratic flows and processes after death. The objective of this article is to examine theoretical aspects of the categories of terminality of life and death in the hospital environment, and the performance of social workers who are part of multiprofessional teams in these occupational spaces. In methodological terms, this is a qualitative study, with an exploratory purpose, conducted through bibliographic review and documentary research. The bibliographic sources analyzed were surveyed through searches of articles published in electronic portals of scientific journals and in annals of events in the category. The main results include the observation of a discrepancy between the themes most addressed in academic-scientific productions and those that have greater prominence in the technical-operative documents that guide the daily professional performance in the hospital environment, revealing an opportunity to deepen the debate on how the unity of theory and practice has been constructed in the performance of social workers who work with death.