Resumo

PASSOS, Joaquim; SEQUEIRA, Carlos  e  FERNANDES, Lia. Prevalência dos Focos de Enfermagem de Saúde Mental em Pessoas Mais Velhas: Resultados da Pesquisa Documental Realizada num Serviço de Psiquiatria. Revista Portuguesa de Enfermagem de Saúde Mental [online]. 2012, n.7, pp.7-12. ISSN 1647-2160.

The problems and needs of older people are often associated with the conditions of mental illness, characterized by a set of clinical manifestations, which constitute attention focuses relevant to nursing practice. These changes must come to the attention and be the concern of health professionals, in order to deepen their knowledge and create evidence that will allow the development of more structured and targeted responses to meet specific needs and to promote active and successful aging. This article presents the results of documentary research carried out in a short stay psychiatric inpatient unit. The main purpose of the study was to identify the mental health nursing focuses most often used by nurses in inpatient caring. We analyzed the records of the Support System for Nursing Practice (SAPE) and Medical Practice (SAM) and data from clinical records of all patients aged 65 or over, who were hospitalized in the unit, during the period from January 1st to December 31st 2010. The study involved a sample of records of 71 patients, of both sexes, with mental illness diagnosed by ICD-9 (International Classification of Diseases), the most common diagnoses being dementia (36.6%) and depression (26.8%). Most of the participants were female (78.9%), widowed (38%), had between 0 and 4 years of education (91.5%) and lived in rural areas (63.4%). The results showed the presence of multiple mental health nursing attention focuses, the most common being insomnia, humour, thinking process, confusion, delusion and sadness. The focuses related to humour and anxiety are more often found in depression diagnosis, while those related to the cognitive and behavioral domain occur most frequently in dementia diagnosis. These results are an important contribution to the clarification of some aspects of the problems and needs of older people with mental health problems, constituting a relevant addition to the research in this area.

Palavras-chave : Psychiatric Nursing; Nursing Diagnosis; Mental Health; Aged.

        · resumo em Português     · texto em Português     · Português ( pdf )