SATISFACTION OF A GROUP OF ELDERLY REGARDING THEIR PARTICIPATION IN A HEALTH PROMOTION PROGRAM PERFORMED BY PHYSIOTHERAPY STUDENTS WITHIN THE CONTEXT OF A COLLABORATIVE WORK

Background:
Health promotion and elderly mobility promotion through group sessions are two important aspects to improve quality of life of this sector of the population. On the other hand, involvement of university students in real-world activities promotes motivation and the acquisition of skills and enriching experiences for their professional future.

Objective:
Determine the level of satisfaction of users of an elderly center regarding a health promotion program carried out by physiotherapy students as a result of a collaborative work in the subject Physiotherapy in Primary Care.

Methods:
Third-course physiotherapy students performed a group work about health promotion in the elderly that was shown to a group of community-dwelling elderly who assiduously attend to an elderly centre of the Ministry of Social Welfare of Valencia. Physiotherapy in primary care is a mandatory subject of 6 ECTS. It expects that students know different ways of promotion and conservation of health in different groups of population. Cooperative work consists of the presentation, by groups of 12-15 students, of a lecture and a practical session about recommendations and therapeutic exercises for the prevention of certain prevalent diseases in the elderly. This work also includes a video recording with real users, in order to show them therapeutic exercises to do at home. This video is delivered to users at the end of the speech. The development of group work represents the 10% of the final grade. It is the first time this kind of work is presented in the real setting.

A total of 6 one-hour lectures were performed, one per week, about different issues related to the elderly: osteoarthritis, gait rehabilitation and prevention of falls. A satisfaction questionnaire was performed to evaluate elderly satisfaction regarding informational talks and exercises carried out in the different sessions. The questionnaire is anonymous and contains 10 Likert questions (1 to 5) where 1 corresponds to "strongly disagree" and 5 "strongly agree".

Results:
According to the results, we can affirm the following answers: "developed contents have resulted interesting and motivating," "the language used in the talks has been understandable", "with this talk I understood how important is the exercise for my health"; being them those best valued by users, with a mean of 4.88, 4.87 and 4.88 over 5 respectively. All these items refer to the understanding and interest that users have found in the sessions received which seems to be the most important aspect from the point of view of those attending them.

Conclusion:
The cooperative work on health promotion, applied to the real elderly population by third-year students of physiotherapy, has been proven to be a positive and enriching experience for a group of community-dwelling elderly. Future studies could assess adherence that this type of work has on users for performing the exercises.

References:
[1] Houghton, C. E., Casey, D., Shaw, D., & Murphy, K. (2013). Students’ experiences of implementing clinical skills in the real world of practice. Journal of Clinical Nursing, 22(13-14), 1961-1969.
[2] Rantanen, T. (2013). Promoting mobility in older people. Journal of Preventive Medicine and Public Health, 46(Suppl 1), S50-S54.
[3] Fukasawa, M., & Yamaguchi, H. (2016). Effect of group activities on health promotion for the community-dwelling elderly. Journal of Rural Medicine: JRM, 11(1), 17.