Filippo Cavallaro (Università degli studi di Messina)
Francesco Grillo (AOU “G. Martino” Messina)
Mariachiara Ceccio (Università degli studi di Messina)
Teresa Pintaudi (Università degli studi di Messina)
Francesco Bonanno (Università degli studi di Messina)
Science and technology have always been directed toward solving the present problems while at the same time assessing and managing the new life conditions and development that the future will propose. A look into the future that creates new opportunities but also poses new problems. Health for WHO (1948) can be defined as “a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity”.
In 1995 a professional profile had been legislated indicating universities as the principal training site for the professional, and the Wcpt General meeting in Washington recommended a minimum duration of 4 years. In 2003 and 2011 AIFI had proposed guidelines for the training of the physiotherapist.
Today, the widespread well-being that led to the lengthening of the average life span and both technological innovation and new therapies ensure the survival chance of people with chronicity and overlapping diseases. For this reason there has been the establishment of new operational units and among them the Stroke Units within the emergency area as a time dependent structure.
Starting from the structure given to the Core training of the physiotherapist and looking at the spaces that have been opened for this profession, a small group of physiotherapists discussed about the training experience lived by each of the participants and a questionnaire aimed at specific knowledge related to physiotherapy’s training and new developments in medicine was proposed.
The study focused on the Stroke Unit, especially:
– The evaluation of the space allocated to physical therapy in a stroke unit
– The analysis of the organization of the stroke unit team
– The management and the definition of physiotherapy times in relation to thrombolised patient’s times
Health care advances in both clinical and organizational settings require a definition of the modalities and the intervention type in new hospital locations with patients on whom the pathology has a drift modulated by innovative therapies. An inconsistency between what is dictated by international LGs and the position in Italy was noted.
There seems to be confusion about the size of the team, because the high specialization leads lot of complications, related to the inescapable need of a holistic approach to complex problems, whatever their nature (especially in health care field). Medicine, in fact, in the biopsychosocial model, deals with the person, as a complex system that cannot be investigated and treated as it was an assembly of mechanical components. Overcoming these difficulties requires individual pathways between the frames of the individual disciplines. Depending on how these boundaries are traversed, we can adopt a multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary, or a more articulate transdisciplinary approach.
We can talk about a multidisciplinary approach if the comparison is held between professionals in the same field with different specializations (it is AIFI as a whole with GIS NIS). In this case it is an intradisciplinary juxtaposition.
Interdisciplinary approach occurs when experts from different fields talks in order to face and overcome a complex critical issues (it is AIFI when at ISS or GIMBE Foundation discuss with Scientific Societies and experts of various disciplines).
Since 1970, with Jean Piaget and Basarab Nicolescu, the term transdisciplinary has the ambition to cross the boundaries separating paradigms, rigid institutional norms and disciplinary labels. “Multidimensionality,” “inclusiveness,” and “creativity” are terms that best denote the transdisciplinary approach.
In the case of Stroke units, we will find ourselves thinking about decubitus prevention (prevention area), managing a monitored and assisted person in IC (emergency area), managing the risks of hospital infections and immunocompromised individuals (infectious disease area).
The complexity of managing patients in the early stages of disease requires revisiting the directions of the physiotherapist’s core training, considering the complex organization of the “iron maiden” trapping erudition.
