THE MEANING OF THE COURSE OF GERONTOLOGY IN THE FORMATION OF UNIOESTE STUDENTS OF PHYSIOTHERAPY

Abstract

The understanding of the senior as social being inserted in the family and in the community in general, is indispensable to the physiotherapist for your professional performance, in order to contemplate the expectations and expressive demands recurrent of the population demographic alterations and subjects of social, cultural and epidemic order. The National Curricular Guidelines of the graduation course in Physiotherapy orientate and guide the elaboration of the pedagogical project that should contemplate the specificities of the effective reality, among them the oldness. The demographic transition, in view of the increasing senior population, generates great challenges for professionals of all the areas, besides the physiotherapists whose formation needs to assist these necessities. The gerontology, as area of knowledge, offers subsidies to these professionals for the demystification of the oldness, through the scientific interpretation of the facts, answering to the countless subjects pertinent to the longevity and the aging, recurrent of the transformation process for which we go through. The accomplished research had as objective to verify the knowledge of the students of the discipline of Gerontology of the Physiotherapy Course of the State University of the West of Paraná - UNIOESTE, on gerontology, aging and oldness, in view of contributing for the evaluation and reformulation of the programs of these professionals' formation, so that they are better based and prepared to accomplish their work in association with senior people. The results of this research allow us to reinforce the idea of the gerontologist formation necessity for physiotherapists, how to point out for the possibility of other interventions and attendances to the senior, since that these professionals are qualified properly. We should assume the necessity of studying forms of improving (enriching) the professionals' formation.