Terapia ocupacional com idosos em processos de terminalidade, morte e luto: percepções de egressas da USP-SP quanto à formação oferecida

The project aimed to know the factors that influence the graduates of occupational therapy in the work with terminality, death and grief processes in elderly, during and after graduation and their perceptions about the academic education offered by USP-SP to work with this population. The study has a qualitative and exploratory character and a semistructured interview was applied, guided by a script. The data was recorded and transcribed and its content analyzed by thematic analysis. The results showed that terminality death and grief were current in the care of the elderly. Conceptions of death, empathy and resources that they accessed in the non-professional context, such as their support network, were mentioned as aspects that influenced their intervention. Some ex-graduates considered the academic education offered by the graduation as sufficient, because it is generalist and allows reflections to act in loss processes while others pointed to the insufficiency of the approach They mention that practical experiences, supervisions and extracurricular activities helped the professional performance.