Autocuidado e apoio social em mulheres do Núcleo Mama Porto Alegre

• Ano de defesa: 2014
• Autor(a) principal: Hermel, Júlia Schneider
• Orientador(a): Pizzinato, Adolfo
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Tipo de acesso: Acesso aberto
• Idioma: por
• Instituição de defesa: Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio Grande do Sul
• Programa de Pós-Graduação: Programa de Pós-Graduação em Psicologia
• Departamento: Faculdade de Psicologia
• País: Brasil
• Palavras-chave em Português: NEOPLASIAS DA MAMA; AUTOCUIDADO; POLÍTICAS PÚBLICAS; PSICOLOGIA SOCIAL
• Área do conhecimento CNPq: CIENCIAS HUMANAS::PSICOLOGIA
• Link de acesso: http://tede2.pucrs.br/tede2/handle/tede/6531

Breast cancer is one the most prevalent types of cancer among women. Many causes are known, ranging from the biological to the psychosocial. In Rio Grande do Sul, especially in Porto Alegre, occurrence rates and fatalities due to breast cancer are some of the highest in the country. In 2004, in an attempt to remedy this situation, a service dedicated to keeping the breast healthy was created: the Núcleo Mama Porto Alegre (NMPOA) project. It registered 9218 women for a follow-up program that involved mammographic screening for ten years, seeking early diagnosis as well as increasing awareness of the need for annual mammographies. The geographic area chosen for this service was a southern region of the city of Porto Alegre in which the greatest social vulnerability and poorest health services were observed. As part of this project, work was undertaken to act on the risk factors for breast cancer through interventions in the psychosocial field. The psychology department contributes to the project by pluralizing the understanding of the disease, adding to the already consolidated biomedical knowledgebase by viewing the disease not only as an individual's experience, but as a collective phenomenon permeated by social agents. From this context emerge the objectives of this study: identifying the preventative, self-care measures taken by these women and analyzing the configurations of their support networks. This project uses a mixed research approach, combining both qualitative and quantitative methods. The first stage is a quantitative study utilizing techniques for the evaluation of self-care capacity and for analyzing social support by way of the "Evaluation of Perceived Social and Community Support" questionnaire. One hundred and nine women participating in the NMPOA, divided into two groups, answered this questionnaire: a group of 37 who had breast cancer and a group of 72 who underwent annual mammographies but had never been diagnosed with the disease. After this quantitative stage, the second stage - composed of narrative, biographical interviews - was started. The women who presented the most extreme self-care and support network scores were invited to participate in this stage, extreme meaning the lowest and highest levels of self-care and support networks in the quantitative stage. The data collected in the study indicates that women who had breast cancer practiced better self-care (t=1.791; p=0.027). Thus, reinforced by the qualitative data, it can be stated that breast cancer diagnosis plays a key role in seeding self-care, in spite of the obvious health risks and fragile support networks. As for social support, the groups do not differ, presenting approximately the same thresholds in the average social support classification level for the majority of the evaluated variables. In the qualitative study, however, the social support received by women who had breast cancer came mainly from family and less from formal institutions and communal efforts.