ABSTRACT
Armed conflicts have profoundly disturbed the traditional organization of the Burundese society. This situation has an important impact on the sanitary structures in the country, especially in the Centre Hospitalo-universitaire (CHU) in Bujumbura, the capital of the country. From a methodological point of view, action research stresses the importance of the relationship between researchers and practitioners. In that perspective, the first phase was devoted to establishing collaborative structures in order to make a diagnosis of the local situation. The diagnosis was based on individual and collective conversations and on an assessment of locally available resources. The sciences of work commonly arrive at the same observation: the limitations of individual and collective interviews to analyse the work, the difficulty of passing from one distinctive register to the other: doing and verbalizing. The object of action research challenges the image of the self and the defensive systems developed to protect oneself from the pain at work.
