This paper aimed to analyze the relationship between ethics and healthcare professionals’ commitment subsequent to productive restructuration. This was a qualitative exploratory-descriptive study on thirty professionals (nurses, doctors and dentists) in a metropolitan region in southern Brazil. The relationship between ethics and commitment has been revealed to be a centerpiece for current healthcare and is also related to some aspects of contemporary social transformations, with the traditional beneficent-paternalistic commitment of the professions and the different logics in the public-private mix. When professionals are unable to subjectively and collectively deal with situations that compromise work ethics, space for moral distress is opened up. The search for humans who do not see themselves in isolation from the whole picture, but as subjects who think and can build an ethical differential in their “humanized” and committed work, seems significant in relation to building quality and excellence in healthcare.
Ethics; Healthcare professional; Job market