A formação do enfermeiro para atuar com a pessoa idosa na Estratégia Saúde da Família

Abstract

This study aims at the training of nurses to work with the elderly, in the Family Health Strategy (FHS). The objective of this research was to analyze the perception of the FHS nurses about their academic formation, to work with the elderly person. This is a descriptive and exploratory research of a qualitative nature. Held with 10 nurses of teams of the FHS of VII, district in the municipality of Maceió - AL. The data were collected through a semistructured interview during the period from April to May 2017. The interviews were analyzed by means of the content analysis technique, from which three themes and six sub-themes originated, namely: Theme 1 - Perception about the graduation of the need for care with the elderly, which is subdivided into : 1.1 - Nonspecificity and emphasis on disease and 1.2 Testing for change; Theme 2 - Desire for a transformative formation, subdivided in: 2.1 - In defense of a training focused on the integral care in the elderly and 2.2 - Strategies that favor the learning of the care to the elderly during the formation; and, finally, Theme 3 - Permanent education: a need pointed out by the nurses, subdivided into: 3.1 - The search for the qualification to act with the elderly person in the service and 3.2 - Learning in the everyday to deal with the elderly person. The results of this study showed that the academic training of these nurses had a biologicistic, unspecific character and little concern with the particularities of the elderly subject. The participants of the study pointed out that they consider important a formation that adopts the integral perspective of the person and that promotes the articulated learning to the reality of the health services and the community in which the students are inserted. In the testimonies, the people involved in the research signaled to the unpreparedness and insecurity in acting with regard to the elderly, in a global way, since the experience that they had during the academic formation was only with the care to the elderly person in the context of the disease, and pointed out that the current academic background seems different to what they had. The experience in the FHS and the emerging demands of the aging process seem to have been the factors that aroused in the nurses an interest to perform activities aimed at the elderly public. The study allowed to conclude that, in the academic formation of these nurses, the moments of learning about the aging process and about the elderly person, in themselves, were few or nonexistent; that these nurses feel the need for training in this area; and that these recognize change, in the current formation, in relation to the attention to the elderly person. These findings led to the need to reflect on the training of nurses to work with the elderly, especially in the context of basic health care.