Introduction:

The planning and implementation of public health policies are processes that are affected by both, problems resulting from an assistance-oriented health system and how these problems are solved by public health specialists in their specific work context.

Objective:

To analyze the work activity of public health specialists working in the Ministry of Health of Bogotá D.C. in order to show how it is associated with their health condition and their negative perception of the work environment.

Materials and methods:

An interpretive, inductive and qualitative study was conducted from an ergological perspective. 4 workers participated in 14 individual meetings in which the "instructions to the alter ego" technique was used. The information obtained from the meetings was interpreted using the discourse analysis technique proposed by Clot.

Results:

The challenges that public health specialists must face while performing their work, the gap between the real work they must engage in and what it is established in the official regulations, and the uniqueness of the profession in three different levels: institutional (macro-level), organizational (meso-level) and personal (micro-level), were identified.

Conclusions:

The fragmentation of the public health specialist workers group implies losing an important resource to mitigate the negative perception of the work environment. Therefore, further research addressing workers groups as a determinant of the transformation process of public health specialists' profession.

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