Cuidar da velhice em humanitude

• Autor(a) principal: Brízido, Anabela Paula
• Data de Publicação: 2017
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10362/21908
• topic: humanitude; MGM; humanização; regulação da saúde; RNCCI; idosos; elderly; health regulation; long term care; humanization; Direito

This essay aims at analysing how the Methodology of Gineste Marescotti (MGM) supported by the Humanitude philosophy could help both regulate and humanize the health care system. It is crucial to set up boundaries to the subject and relate it to a certain population and a concrete organizational model of social and health services. The rise in life expectancy tied with the increase of the aging index and the failing birth rate has introduced considerable demographic changes. These developments prompt the elderly to be a particularly important social group. Regardless, amongst the multitude of diseases that may occur, the most common are neurodegenerative ones, which lead to dependency. The State must therefore manage the scarce resources to best meet the needs of the elderly, who are entitled to humanized and dignified care. Their right to autonomy and self-determination has to be granted, even in severe situations, in order to avoid infantilized treatment and social ostracization. In that sense, the State plays a vital role in the safeguard of their rights, which allows them to have future well-being and a satisfactory quality of life. This means that other actors, who also help perform the public duty of taking good and safe care of the elderly, must therefore abide by the complex yet necessary State regulation, whose fundamental role has shifted from being a caregiver to become a regulator. Thus, taking into account that the MGM has developed several techniques in the improvement of care standards of dependent elderly, and also that the national network of Long Term Care (LTC) constitutes a viable answer for all problems related to dependency, a connection between the MGM, LTC and the elderly is put forward. Our approach has considered the main political and legal outcomes, seeing that they enhance the role of the Civil Societyas an important stakeholder in the identification of the needs of the elderly, as well as in lobbying public policy and raising awareness; the legal interpretation of the principles and rights of the LTC evidences the value of the MGM for a more humanized humanizing care.