Conhecimento sobre cuidados paliativos entre médicos residentes de um hospital universitário

Abstract

The palliative care, until the 1980s, was predominantly used for cancer patients. However, in the current scenario, the growing need for this new approach to various diseases, which does not always find technical and scientific support on the part of the doctors, because knowledge about palliative care are still insufficient and trainings are practically non-existents during medical training. Thus, the objective was to evaluate the knowledge about palliative care among physicians residing in a University Hospital. An exploratory, descriptive, cross-sectional and quantitative approach was carried out among residents physicians at the Universitary Hospital of Universidade Federal de Sergipe, through the application of a questionnaire based on two instruments: the first validated in Colombia and the second one, carried out in Japan – Palliative Care Knowledge Test. The sample profile consisted predominantly of women (66,7%), professionals between 20 and 29 years (59.4%), between one and four years of training (60.4%). The majority of physicians (78.1%) stated that they did not receive enough information about terminally ill patients during the time of graduation. After analyzing all the questions, only 7.3% of the sample presented an excellent evaluation, with more than eighty percent of the questions, having largely achieved a median result. This fact suggests how bad is our medical training, when it comes to subjects inherents in the palliation.