The sociodemographic profile of the 21 health professionals who formed the focus groups consists of (02) doctors, (09) nurses, (02) physical educators, (02) physiotherapists, (02) nutritionists, (02) social workers and (02) psychologists; (17) were female and (4) male; with a predominant age group of 20-30 years; most of the training occurred in the last two to five years, coinciding with the referred PHC experience. Regarding titles: (08) mentioned specialization, (02) mentioned a complementary elderly health training course, while alluding to the title of master. The fact that only two men participated in the sample suggests a gender bias due to the high degree of female adherence to higher education health courses.
Below are the results supported by the themes that originated the conversations, referring to each issue-problem: the meanings about being old and aging triggered by the professionals’ narratives; the organization of work at the UAPS related to vulnerable older adults; and health services responsive to risk factors for falls among older adults.
3.1. Being Old and Aging - senses triggered by narratives
For the stimulus offered to the FG, the professionals were invited to talk about their previous knowledge, everything that was apprehended or experienced, and that made them create or recreate representations. In this regard, the following narratives are retrieved:
Old age is a natural course of human beings. The person is born, becomes a child, teenager, young person... Until old age. It is a stage of development with its specificities and that, within society, this stage receives much attention from the health field. Many academic works focus on this phase of life. (PS-06).
In graduation, at least in nursing, we see the stages of life a lot, and in one of these stages, we have disciplines on elderly health. In these, we see a lot about the diseases of this stage of life. We don’t usually see or study healthy older adults. So, the graduation course focuses on treating pathologies in older adults. (PS-03).
We should say that one narrative influences another in group dynamics, shaping representations and favoring or prevailing plots whose vocabulary is technical/academic, or refers to the time of higher education, to what they learned from older adults through specialized literature, referring to the representation of old age as a pathology.
As they keep talking and listening, professionals tend to migrate the discourse and, in the examples of narratives below, they signal that they will detach themselves from this academic universe to delve into common sense representations – which is what this study pursues:
About old age... When you look and listen to the typical person talks, you hear that the old is no longer good for much’. Now, as a physiotherapist – and I already have a perspective that may differ from other professionals – I learned not to look at older adults as if they were no longer any good’. I was taught to look at his capabilities and work with this. (PS-08).
I think that, to a certain extent, before graduation, the perception is very negative (referring to older adults) because old age already brings this nomenclature of old, outdated, that is no good any longer, that which you no longer use because its old and worn out. We work on this new perspective of old age and aging throughout our graduation in psychology. (PS-10).
In this regard, some health professions can produce favorable representations, especially those that understand the comprehensive being, while others, disease-focused, tend to maintain stigmatized representations. Complementary lines emerge, and the highlight below shows how the narrators start to detach from them this negative perception about older adults and old age, starting to infer it as a problem brought by the older adults into the therapeutic relationship:
What I see in my office is that, for many patients, aging is synonymous with suffering. I see a feeling of hopelessness. I see this older adult with very negative statements: My life doesn’t matter anymore, my children don’t care about me anymore, and society doesn’t care... And I’ve done everything I had to do”. It’s as if, for him, life is already over. (PS-18).
There is a considerable stigma related to older adults and old age. It (referring to old age) is considered negative [...]. Because people dont want to reach that age, and its because they feel the weight of negativity that accompanies representations: becoming dependent on other people, start moving less... (PS-12).
We interpret from the statements that the common sense representation impregnates older adults with its negative burden and because it conforms to a thought in elderly patients with some health impairment. That being the case, when formulated critically and reflectively, the representation expressed by the health professional will likely help the patient reframe this harmful self-representation. In the highlight below, the nuance modifies or reclassifies the narrative under the protection of social slogans:
Old age is a stage that could be healthy, which could be the “best age”... As they say. However, in my practical experience, I see that little (PS-18).
It is called the ‘best age’ but is rarely perceived that way [...] (PS-19).
This mode of representation is said to conceal a real/personal feeling, that is, one is facing (pre)understandings consciously or unconsciously inserted in the narratives [
68,
85]. Furthermore, the content of this representation denotes a belief that there is greater potency/power of other age groups regarding old age, so being old is understood as a disadvantage from this viewpoint.
3.2. Perception of PHC and organization of work related to vulnerable older adults
Due to this classification system, the data block related to the PHC services is available: how they are organized and the perception of effectiveness, considering the older adults’ demands. The analysis follows the logic of the order of data produced according to the stimuli: “talk about the professions in place and involved in care; address the available services/resources; and which strategies are used in health education and promotion”:
We are a multidisciplinary team with different emphases. So, each emphasis contributes according to its specificity in elderly care. We organize ourselves, therefore, to perceive their demands in a way that each professional category will have a perspective and, through listening, will perceive the main demands that each professional participates in (PS-11).
It is very enriching and advantageous to have a whole team to assist older adults because they (older adults) listen to various subjects, and they learn, absorb and pass on to their families and neighbors. Furthermore, like it or not, we bond with that user, and the user starts to trust the professional more. When guidance stems from a professional that is fine-tuned with the older adult (the bond), they end up absorbing it and starting to put into practice what they were educated, taught to do (PS-04).
Im from the multidisciplinary residency. We can see the importance of each knowledge and how much knowledge complements each other. There is no way to talk only about nutrition with older adults with a whole life behind them... Its not just food. So, we complement each other a lot. That is why the multidisciplinary residency program is so essential (PS-15).
When narrating about the modality of multidisciplinary care, the agents recall the importance of complementarity of knowledge, besides mentioning some of the pillars of the therapeutic relationship, such as creating bonds and establishing a relationship of trust between professionals and older adults. However, only the former narrates about listening to older adults, whereas the vector is the authority of health professionals toward older adults in the others. Moreover, FG workers hold a uniform type of discourse regarding the purpose of the teams. They continue to expose the most known/disclosed design of multidisciplinary practices and the meanings attributed to the need and reason for the teams’ existence. Again, regarding the organization of their work with older adults, the workers remember their respective actions:
I also work in the guidance of rights. In some cases, the older adult is sick and suffers from property violence, sometimes without even knowing it: this is violence in which older adults do not access their money, although they are oriented/aware. We also have moral violence and negligence – even negligence that occurs in a specific institution and, therefore, they need to know their rights and where to claim them. (PS-07).
My professional knowledge can sometimes help with the most essential nutrition information. So, I believe that the basics that I talk about food already interfere a lot with their health and diet… They start to understand. (PS-08).
Since the Alma-Ata declaration, one of the greatest references in primary health care, Brazilian health reform scientists have concentrated on the need to project the role of health teams [
86]. The very SUS was established as a project not limited to a single sector, incorporating the ideas of integration, territoriality, and social participation, to guarantee rights in the context of an expanded concept of health. Given the complexity of real life, one would assume joint work with other areas and fields of knowledge to think about/implement changes impacting the causes of illness [
87].
From a somewhat myopic perspective of health professionals, no reference has been made to the intersectoral network and the cross-sectoral approach in integrating knowledge/experiences for case management [
88]. Thus, the statements reflect the services in the better-known and consolidated format: fixed structures, local stakeholders, and strict care protocols. Only two narratives come closer to describing what human complexity is in primary care:
Regarding nursing, you end up seeing everything. That is, you will be able to access more information and that patient more and more in its most comprehensive form as you interact with that patient: the social issue, the issue of medication use, diseases, family history, the relationship with the partner, anyway. [...] We gradually realize these things with the office practice or bond with the family/patient. You try to clarify and start directing the care to the specificities of a patient... Furthermore, understanding that one persons need is not anothers, right? (PS-12).
In primary care – especially when working with the same community for a long time, serving the same population and families – you can look at a family core. It is not just looking at that patient sitting there, but you remember that the day before, you served the pregnant granddaughter of that older woman. You know that the granddaughter lives with her... So, you will understand how the network works, which even favors your understanding of that patient’s family and social context. […] As you exercise this knowledge in your clinical practice, you become more and more prepared to identify certain issues and (try) to solve them. (PS-06).
We should remember that the field occupied by PHC, in its larger Family Health Strategy (ESF), proposes that the work be developed to promote ordinary people to the condition of reading realities so that they can assess what is best for them. They decide based on the best consensus (considering personal and community resources), and that is what autonomy is about, whose most evident strategy is encouraging people’s self-care in health. However, this was only heard of now.
Continuing with the FG, in the stimulus given to address the strategies used in education and health promotion, there are the following examples of narratives:
Primary care should have a lot of this prevention, health promotion perspective... (But) It doesn’t have much of a preventive perspective. (PS-14).
This health promotion and prevention issue is in the background, and we serve a tiny audience of older adults for this purpose. (PS-17).
Its hard for us to find someone here, an older adult who comes here purely for health promotion, right? I see more already in the part where we have to solve something. (PS-20).
Derived from these narratives was the insight for the FG to address older adults’ representations regarding PHC spaces. The narratives produced will reveal that, besides PHC not remembering to use intersectoriality and partnerships with other social equipment in the region to offer health promotion activities for older adults, its professionals will complain that they should know/do prevention or the movement to seek help – with little or superficial understanding of the condition of vulnerability to which older adults are exposed.
Most people seek the Health Center more often when they already have a health problem. It’s more about medication. [...] the hypertensive, the diabetic... who come more for medical appointments. (PS-14).
In primary care, older adults seek the service more from a more curative perspective, more for recovery when they already have a health problem. (PS-17).
When he comes, he often comes with depression, anxiety, and dependence on psychiatric medications. (PS-18).
Ive been following that, increasingly, people look for the PHC Unit, the health service, when they already have something acute. Its much more problematic. When people get here, its already an emergency. So, the people who followed up here only look for the health center when they have urgent needs. Then, unfortunately, we have to work on this demand, always trying to guide. Sometimes, it even frustrates us because its almost as if we were trying to solve something that wasn’t in the past. (PS-20).
The perception is that patients “do not perform” the promotion/prevention actions, only seeking PHC when “they are already sick”. Still, in the health care spaces, the patient, the older adult, is a character seen as accumulating doubts, someone who is unaware or does not know (about his illness and care and medication use), needing the health professional to behave better.
We should remember that PHC is part of the larger field of Collective Health, which, in turn, dates back to the founding principles of Social Medicine practices [
89], through which it is considered to broaden the vision of older adults, to alleviate the weaknesses/vulnerabilities of this population group in the face of adverse events, with measures to monitor social and economic conditions so that they live with better quality, have healthy habits, and interact with social networks for more autonomy and independence, reducing the biological harm that incapacitates older adults [
90,
91,
92].
Next, the narratives add the “ingredient” of vulnerability, talking about older adults’ lack of formal education, local violence, and other risk indicators for illness. Everything comes to the detriment of the more coherent frequency routine of older adults to health services:
Due to a lack of formal knowledge (I think this is a striking factor in this population), these people often do not know that they need to undergo a routine examination; they do not know how to relate a headache to high blood pressure... Thus, they end up in the emergency room. (PS-07).
I think aging here is more complicated due to vulnerability. I think thats it: a tiresome and suffering aging, full of violence; therefore, more passive aging in self-care, less active in the presence of support groups... (PS-11).
Due to social conditions, society and the family do not offer support... So, they only come to the health center when they already have something chronic. (PS-12).
At the very least, these statements bring potential reflections to subsidize lines of necessary changes and (re)orientation of clinical work in Public Health aimed at older adults. Regarding the excerpts reproduced, one habitus function is to account for linking the practices and intangible consumer goods of the individual stakeholder or the group of stakeholders [
93], and this is not precisely related to formal education but stems from previous experience. Thus, what happens with the problem of the consumer good represented by health is that it is more like a discourse in the moral-cultural scope than it can express a concern accompanied by practical actions by public power entities to transform it into possible mass consumption [
94,
95,
96] – and the general population assimilates this. Older adults who experience several other needs can also accumulate negative experiences with healthcare in such a way that not seeking the post early is just a hesitant behavior in the face of obstacles.
It is difficult to argue in favor of a Universal Health System in the context in which it is reduced to a mechanism for caring for people experiencing poverty [
95]. It is not uncommon for health posts to experience problems (some of them chronic) lacking professionals, medicines, devices, and essential services. There needs to be more bureaucracy and significant delays in performing services. Jairnilson Paim thus speaks of the “risk of dismantling the SUS” when, in government policies, health is a peripheral issue [
95]. Regarding health service shortcomings, we should note two particularly revealing narratives:
We have from very active older adults [...] to the bedridden patient who cannot come to the unit. We have those who come and report a fall: they fell in the street, on the way to the doctors office... Or they complain of some other problem. We access and intervene as the patient shows himself to us as he talks about his difficulty. (PS-06).
That time and the number of people we serve do not allow us to sit down and discuss everything with them. We attend 17 in the morning and 17 in the afternoon, plus triage. We need to find a way to sit and talk about everything. Our time is rushing. Furthermore, its not getting any better. (PS-21)
With these narratives, professionals reveal the prevalence of problem-based care and make clear their working conditions and demand, showing that they also need to deal with their yoke and limitations. The narratives of professionals who addressed the theme of older adults in their relationship with their families remember that every family lives the reality of the vulnerable. The plot built was that older adults are found in the settings (homes and communities) taking care of relatives, children, and grandchildren, always with a bias towards family contexts that are fewer partners and more incomprehensible:
Older adults are there supporting the family financially and with food. They support raising their grandchildren, too – they take care of them so their children can work and have a productive life. (PS-08).
Sometimes, older adults are the only provider in the family, and they sacrifice/neglect their care. (PS-09).
Some older adults are overloaded: they must cook food for their children and grandchildren. Sometimes, other relatives come in for lunch. They feel responsible for this... (PS-12).
Some older adults are there with a child on drugs, and they must put up with it. (PS-20).
Besides the older adult issue, what transpires in these narratives is a sick social system with no perspective and little capacity for self-elaboration. Perceptions about the low presence of men (and male older adults) looking for care will be elucidated in other narratives:
I attend to older adults and see a gender bias: women look out for me. (PS-12).
It is infrequent to see a man. [...] They only come to seek treatment when the disease is already settled (PS-13).
Men voluntarily seeking the post is almost inexistent and is very rare indeed. (PS-19).
According to surveys [
97,
98], women (including older women) are concerned with general care practices for several reasons, but mainly for resolving the health of other family members. They also accept invasive exams better and are more responsive to the biomedical discourse as a device for controlling “the sick body”. Whether this is recognized as cultural, it is still demarcated by professionals, besides gender bias, ethnicity, social class, and education as variables that deserve attention from PHC professionals:
Within the range of women I see, we should add that they are also poor, less educated Black women. (PS-13).
Women with a vulnerable profile living in Caucaia suffer daily from public disrespect and the most diverse violence forms, and it is the municipality with the highest occurrence of femicides in the State of Ceará [
99]. We should ask the health services to mention which measures are taken towards the empowerment of these women since the combination of factors and contours of structuring poverty produces oppressive contexts and a specific type of historical racism, very intertwined with stereotypes, highlighting, of course, invisibility as its social capital.
3.3. Responsive health services and risk of falls among older adults
The following narrative is highlighted regarding the factors associated with systemic imbalance with risk of falls among older adults:
The problem in old age begins with the motor issue, walking alone. Because some will have Parkinsons, others may get diseases in their hands, including Chikungunya – many are in much pain, unable to do simple manual activities. We have motor difficulties, the issue of the senses (vision, hearing, smell). Sensitivity is reduced in all of this with advanced age. So, to chew, they lack teeth; vision is lacking to see things well; hearing is also poor. Walking alone is complicated: they dont hear a car horn or may not feel other dangers. If they fall, they have other problems walking, moving, and preventing them from falling again. (PS-17).
When it comes to falls, the architectural factor of the city was remembered along with others that make sense to address the affected systemic balance, including socioeconomic factors:
The architectural issue, the city, the place where he lives, and the issue of sidewalks. All this has to be considered when talking about falls in older adults. The path that they take to solve their activities is difficult to access. This will interfere with possible falls. (PS-07).
These older adults are not taking care of themselves. They don’t exercise. They dont eat right – they are eating poorly. Many of them are eating instant noodles and junk food. (PS-08).
Lack of food or poor quality can cause weakness, muscle pain, inflammation, and even increased blood pressure. (PS-20).
According to the statements, it is possible to state the narrators’ reaffirmation of old age as a phase of life to manage cognitive and physical weaknesses/limitations in the face of their environment, food and economic difficulties/deficiencies, and complex family relationships. Other representations come as voices from the field: they are professionals with home-visiting practices and will approach the theme from the perspective of this universe:
Numerous factors interfere with balance and the possibility of falls in older adults. When visiting the family, we have to see the physical and human structures inside the home: if the home has a built-up area at the bottom and the top; if there are any rear areas (backyard); how many people reside; if we have children who will leave a toy on the floor; whether it has bathrooms with facilities; anyway... Sometimes, older adults do not control their blood pressure with medications. They only take them when their pressure increases and they still eat inadequate things – according to them, because the money is not enough’. (PS-20).
Older adults at home may slip and fall in the bathroom. Even food, because not eating well, can make you feel dizzy and have an imbalance. The use of medications is also a problem. With the increase in anxiety and depressive disorders, patients start taking a little medication to sleep and become number, which can contribute to that. (PS-07).
Among the central points pointed out as risks of falling are the “non-adapted” housing conditions for older adults, the intergenerational “care overlap” of grandchildren, besides the side effects of the concomitant use of medications. Regarding primary health services responsive to older adults, therapeutic groups are remembered as strategic actions to determine a “healthy aging”, as the stakeholders-narrators point out:
The issue of healthy aging… I want to mention the issue of groups held to keep balance in older adults and avoid other complications. The CRAS (referring to the Social Assistance Reference Center) and us here have physical activity work. In short, this type of more bodywork and health education can be done to help prevent it. (PS-13).
In socialization groups, we usually do many health education actions besides interprofessional appointments, where we help each other and complement each other to observe this older adult holistically. (PS-12).
The specific literature [
89,
90,
91,
92,
93,
94,
95,
96,
97,
98,
99,
100,
101] discloses the fact that each profession in primary health care, with its particular knowledge, underpins or forms the pillar of therapeutic plans or expanded projects of “interventions”, which insinuates that all knowledge is cross-cutting and interchangeable in these interventions [
102]. From this perspective, most of the narratives that address “therapeutic groups” reinforce the characteristics that they originate from the sum of professional talents to diagnose risk and initiate cycles of promoting a healthy life or minimize harms associated with morbid events, anticipating their effects on the daily life activities of older adults. Thus, the workers’ FG were urged to address interdisciplinary interventions and integrated therapeutic plans from the perspective of institutions responsive to healthy aging:
Older adults come for more than just lectures here, but for therapies: Reiki, auriculotherapy... They manage to relieve their anxiety. [...] It’s even a way to leave the family environment, where there is so much stress, to arrive in an environment where they can talk, feel welcomed, and be well cared for. (PS-05).
We have a group here called Healthy Life. Older adults feel more alive in this group, with the power to speak and use their widespread knowledge... This group gives them a voice and nurtures their social and community relationship. (PS-08).
We have projects here: Pilates, Yoga for ladies, for example, which greatly help. They wont cure, but they will help somewhere. (PS-12).
Some do Pilates groups, and others also participate in NASF older adultsgroups or attend CRAS elderly groups... So, many have this engagement spirit (PS-20).
We note narratives suggestive of integrative and complementary health practices in PHC, suggesting an openness to understanding older adults in their entirety, including considering the context of receptive coexistence so that they can express themselves in a safe environment.
The PHC philosophy itself provides for the achievement of some independence and autonomy for older adults by promoting the inclusion of these people in therapeutic groups or unconventional practices, characterized by being distinguished from biomedicine by not focusing on medication, being low-cost, integrated with family and society, and put the subject in an active position regarding his care [
103].