Cuidados paliativos: habilidades e importância do tema para discentes de graduação em Medicina

Abstract

In the context of Medicine, death is always considered as a synonym of failure of the medical professional, being generally approached with a scientific vision, without approaching the emotions. At the moment, palliative care is essential. The objective of this article was to evaluate the degree of ability and importance of Palliative Care theme in medical curriculum. This is a cross-sectional, descriptive study with the application of an adapted version of the "PEAS - Physicians' End-of-Life Care Attitude Scale", developed by Levetown, Hayslip and Peel (1999-2000). Based on the 64 (sixty-four) items originally in the instrument, 37 (thirty-seven) assertions were elaborated, organized in order to better serve the purposes of the study, being verified the students' self-perception of their technical ability to deal with Palliative Care of terminally ill patients and also to evaluate the importance attributed by them to the insertion of specific elements of the subject in the curriculum of graduation in Medicine. The questionnaire was applied in 2015 to all students who were willing to attend and who were attending the internship (last two years of the course), at the Faculty of Medicine (FAMED) of the Federal University of Alagoas (UFAL), in a total of 134 (hundred and thirty-four) participants. The studied variables were: a) age; B) sex; C) classification of self-perception in relation to the degree of competence regarding topics on interaction with patients and relatives and clinical management; D) concern with clinical decisions that may contradict what is legally, ethically and professionally accepted or that may be contrary to personal beliefs; E) classification of situations in relation to death; And f) indication of the degree of importance that some subjects should have in the medical curriculum of FAMED / UFAL. The students claimed to need supervision to discuss palliative care and withdrawal of treatment with patients and family members. The data suggest that the students identify the deficiencies caused by the absence/limitation of the teaching related to palliative care, as well as show interest in seeing it included with more prominence in the medical curriculum, thus remaining uncontested the importance of the theme for the training humanized education of medical students beyond the unqualified pursuit of healing. From these results, an application product was created for the academic community, as well as for health professionals, to contribute to their training and disseminate knowledge about Palliative Care, available for free download for Android and IOS devices (Figure 1), with a total size of 2.94 mb.