A identidade de si do profissional fisioterapeuta: uma aproximação inicial

Abstract

INTRODUCTION: In 1969, Physiotherapy became recognized as a pr of e ssion in Brazil, becoming one of the 14 regulated professions in the health field. Based on the biomedical model and on the discourse of professionalism as a statutory and ideological way of organizing wo rk, the profession has been (re)writing its path ba s ed on professional autonomy, in search of its own professional identity based on a scientifically oriented practice. OBJECTIVE: To analyze the relationship between the social representations about the ide ntity of physiotherapists and the dimensions of t he construction of the socio professional identity. METHODOLOGY: It was a descriptive, exploratory and non probabilistic study, operationalized through the combined use of qualitative and quantitative method s, with the use of the data collection technique th r ough an online semi structured questionnaire. For quantitative data, closed questions were used in order to characterize the participants in terms of professional profile, training process, career, job ma rket, work process and self identity. The qualita ti v e data originated from free evocations of words by the interviewees with the purpose of characterizing the forming dimensions of the identity of the profession. As well as the quantitative data were analy zed using descriptive statistics, the qualitative d a ta, arising from the evocations of words, were analyzed using the frequency of semantic groups, average order of evocations and word clouds RESULTS: A total of 495 physiotherapists participated in the st udy, predominantly female, white, graduated from pr i vate higher education institutions, who had the physiotherapy course as their first choice, had taken or were taking a specialization course and were satisfied with their work. The participants characteri zed the training as difficult and demanding knowl ed g e; the career as difficult and rewarding; the labor market as difficult and competitive and the work process as rewarding and exhausting. CONCLUSION: It is undeniable that during the process of physiotherapy identity construction, it suffered several s oc i o professional influences, and although it is a recent profession in the field of health, it presents weaknesses in its insertion in the labor market and in its way of acting. The profession tends to gain new spaces, above all to be recognized with its ow n identity, breaking the paradigm of a rehabilitating and crystallized image in the biomedical model. The profession continues to have the movement of the human body as the main object of study and professional practice, becoming the only profession capa bl e of acting in all systems of human movement.