A realidade da anorexia e bulimia nos alunos do 9º ano de escolaridade de duas escolas do Concelho de Almada

Abstract

This report is a learning process which aims to describe the activities developed during the stage at the Community Care Unit of the ACES Almada Península de Setúbal I, under the National School Health Programme since april 2011 until january 2012. Its organization is founded on the design of health planning, one of the important points to make a diagnosis of health. Thus, when reflecting on the needs of nursing intervention in a specific community, we have identified, in the first module, the need to address the issue of eating disorders in the school population. Because the school is the physical space where adolescents spend most of the time, and knowing also that the eating disorders affect more teenagers for their vulnerability, representing 5% of deaths within the psychiatric illnesses, it made perfect sense to address this problem. This reflects an aspect of the goals of Public Health Nursing that is to diagnose and investigate health problems and health risks in the community. In the second stage module we developed various activities in which through the assessment of body mass index (BMI) of the students and through the analysis of the questionnaires applied, we have obtained some important results, which motivated us to act as community nurses. Before a sample of 181 students, 22 needed to be referred to the Health Units, and by the end of stage we managed 4 referrals. In this way, we managed to carry out specific nursing interventions, not only for the appropriate referral of the identified cases, but also for the promotion, health protection and the disease prevention in the community, in order to achieve the degree of excellence in the quality of life and health gains. Thus, in addition to the design of primary prevention, this project turned out to correspond to secondary prevention, as it has identified health problems, intervening in its possible resolution, promoting the monitoring of the young by his family doctor and nurse, to combat disorder feeding behavior.

Date of Award	Jun 2012
Original language	Portuguese
Awarding Institution	Universidade Católica Portuguesa
Supervisor	Amélia Simões Figueiredo (Supervisor)