Concepts of health in nursing education in undergraduate schools of Brazil and portugal.

This article represents an extract of my PhD research regarding the concepts of health present in undergraduate schools of nursing of Brazil and Portugal. The objective of this research was to comprehend how the concepts of health are explicit in the documents of undergraduate courses and how they are expressed in the discourses of the nursing professors and students. For this, thematic content analysis was used to analyze the professional education of the nurses and the concepts of health present in the nursing courses. The presentation of the results was performed using the Collective Subject Discourse technique. The results showed that in the state of Santa Catarina in Brazil, the concepts of health follow the National Curriculum Guidelines and there is an emphasis directed towards reflection on the Brazilian National Health System (SUS); while in the city of Porto, in Portugal, these concepts follow the Study Plans of the Nursing courses and emphasize nursing care both for the healthy and the sick person. The data also reveal a concern in the construction of the concept of people-centered healthcare.

[Profile of the caregiver of dependent elderly family members in a home environment in the city of Porto, Portugal]. / Perfll do familiar cuidador de idoso fragilizado em convívio doméstico da grande Região do Porto, Portugal.

This descriptive research aims to identify the profile of the family caregiver using the World Health Organization's QPFC and WHOQOL-Bref (instrument application methods) in a sample of 120 family caregivers of dependent elderly patients who represented the population of three Healthcare Centers in the area of the Great Porto, Portugal. Data were collected in the period between January 2005 and March 2005. Results indicated that female caregivers with 55 years of average age, who had other family care giving duties besides caring for the elderly family member, were the majority. The circumstances surrounding care giving, in the perspective of the elderly patient and the other family demands, generated negative consequences to the caregiver's life and health. However, at the same time, caregivers expressed positive perceptions and rewarding feelings when caring for the elderly family member. In a nutshell, it is essential for nurses to consider the binomial caregiver and dependent elderly patient, since both demand special healthcare attention from healthcare services.

[Family, a care unit for its members: reflexive concerns]. / Família uma unidade de cuidado para seus membros: inquietações reflexivas.

This reflection has searched through a brief historic perspective, to understand the family as a care unit for its members. It has as objective, to awake a health professional's more conscientious new look for the care to elderly people in chronical condition, aiming to extend this look to the family as a unit care. This reflexion leans on Systemic Thought, that is, on the comprehension that the family isn't the sum of parts, but pressuposes the whole and the parts at the same time, thus it isn't possible to see the individual only without looking at the family as a whole in the dynamical relations and interactions between them. After the realized re-reading it became that it's necessary to rethink new strategies to approach the care to the bearer of a chronic disease such as diabetes, that embrace the whole family as focus attention of its members health, considering the complexity, intersubjectivity and instability of the new pos-modern science paradigm.

[Systematic approach to family nursing: thoughtful considerations]. / Abordagem sistêmica de enfermagem à família--considerações reflexivas.

This study is part of the theoretical referential of doctorate in development thesis based on Bertalanffy, Vasconcellos and Capra's ideas. It searches from the systemic approach to comprehend the family as a inter-relations system among the members, an irreducible open unit to the continuous flow of entrance and exit of energy, a dynamic unit in which the whole and the parts are influenced mutually. It aims the development of a professional reflection for the Care of Nursing for the family not as context, but the familiar one. Its genesis is related to the many concerns that have surfaced from professional activities which have met answers in the new paradigmatic approach of the post-modern science of the complexity, instability, intersubjectiveness for the think/act of Nursing in the interdisciplinary development of their careful actions of joint way: the unit family.