Sexual performance in the practice of occupational therapists in Brazil

Abstract

Introduction: Individuals and collectives perform various sexual activities to engage in occupations and participate in everyday life. However, in the Brazilian scenario of occupational therapy, there is little evidence about its approach in professional practice. Aim: To identify how occupational therapists in Brazil address sexual performance in their professional practice. Method: An exploratory and descriptive research was conducted with 84 occupational therapists in Brazil, using an online questionnaire. Simple statistics were used for the description of the data and the enunciation and correlation procedures of the Content Analysis approach for the inference of the contents. Results: The sample consisted mostly of female occupational therapists, of which 91.66% had never received specific training. Even so, 53.57% address sexual performance in their professional practice, with the highest prevalence in the field and mental health services with the adult population. Conclusion: There is a need to triangulate factors related to training, personal and theoreticals values and the intervention process for sexual performance. There is still little training on the subject, which is consistent with the difficulties in identifying specific approaches in occupational therapy, which, possibly, contributes to the neglect of this subject in the literature of the area.