Mobilidade de pessoas idosas hospitalizadas: um estudo de representações sociais

Abstract

The research was developed based on the problem that hospitalization, even unintentionally, favors the occurrence of risks and when it comes to elderly people, can generate physical, psychological and social problems that could be avoided by encouraging mobility. Objective: to apprehend the social representations of the nursing team about the phenomenon of the hospitalized elderly's movement. This is a descriptive-exploratory research with a qualitative approach, based on the principles of the Theory of Social Representations, with a focus on the structural approach. The studied social group was composed of 100 professionals from the nursing team that works in open units for the care of the elderly, from a university hospital, in the city of Salvador, Bahia, Brazil. For data collection, techniques of free association of words and unstructured interviews were used. The data of the free association of words were processed by the EVOC software that determined the structure of the social representation through the frame of four houses. The corpus of characteristics was analyzed in line with the thematic content analysis. In the frame of four houses, considering the frequency and the average order of evocations, the terms “fall, bedridden and care” and made up the central nucleus. The set of terms included in the framework of four houses of resonance in the new categories and enabled the construction of three thematic categories: Care involving risks, care aimed at maintaining independence and attention to deal with barriers to mobility. The nursing team, when exposing a structure represented in front of the analyzed object, makes it clear that it is not limited only to the execution of care, it goes further when thinking about the mobilization security of the elderly. A specific team that works with a focus on this domain of management of the limiting factors brought on the board, could be concerned with thinking about the operationalization of these strategies, providing people, equipment, materials and other needs. Although the research is limited to a group of professionals, it is necessary to deepen the studies and analyze how the elements do among themselves, in addition to other research in the area to better elucidate the relationship that health professionals establish as a priority in the recovery of mobility of the elderly. hospitalized.