This Friday, in the Auditorium of Hospital Padre Américo, the first Physical Therapy Conference of the Local Health Unit of Tâmega and Sousa (ULSTS) took place, an initiative that brought together physiotherapists, students and specialists from different institutions to discuss knowledge updates and the future of the profession. The theme of the event was "The path of Physical Therapy inside and outside the hospital", seeking to showcase the intervention of these professionals in different contexts and levels of healthcare.
In the opening sessions, Manuela Martinho, coordinator physiotherapist at ULSTS, highlighted the professionals' involvement in the organization and thanked the Board of Directors for their support. The President of the Order of Physiotherapists, António Lopes, emphasized the importance of multidisciplinary and interprofessional work, while Filipa Carneiro, Clinical Director of Hospital Healthcare Services, and Sónia Moreira, Clinical Director of Primary Healthcare Services, stressed the need to ensure an integrated response increasingly closer to people, especially given population aging and the increase in chronic diseases.
During the conference, participants addressed various areas of intervention, including chronic musculoskeletal pain, oncological pain associated with breast cancer and pain in chronic respiratory diseases, in a panel entitled "Pain doesn't wait". Physical Therapy was also discussed at different points in the patient journey, from intensive care support to palliative care, including post-operative care in cardiac surgery and intervention in patients undergoing prolonged mechanical ventilation. Rehabilitation in sports and pelvic health, with emphasis on urinary incontinence in high-performance athletes, completed the topics under discussion.
Artificial intelligence also had its own dedicated space in the program, with a panel on the opportunities, challenges and impacts of these technologies on physiotherapists' practice, where the application of artificial intelligence to ULSTS's own reality was also presented. The program included e-poster presentations and two practical workshops on the relationship between Physical Therapy and the vagus nerve in chronic pain and the challenges of postural stability in pediatric intervention. The conference concluded with a comprehensive approach to the profession and the new challenges in healthcare.
