Reginaldo Félix always liked moving around: driving, traveling, visiting land for sale, meeting people around the city were activities that were part of his daily life. The routine, stable and always integrated with the people and places around, found an unexpected impasse. In 2021, Reginaldo was shot during a robbery and, as a result, suffered a spinal cord injury that left him paraplegic. At 56 years old, the merchant, born in Monte das Gameleiras, in Rio Grande do Norte, had to transform his life – and discover new ways to continue doing everything he loved.

Two years later, Reginaldo found the strategies that allow him to do what he wants and needs to do, even without the movement of his legs. To achieve this, developing a new skill was essential: handling a wheelchair. He is one of the members of the wheelchair management group for people with spinal cord injuries at the Santos Dumont Institute, in Macaíba, which began its activities in January 2023 with users of the care line of the institution's Specialized Rehabilitation Center (CER ISD). 

Before starting practice in the group, Reginaldo says he knew very little about wheelchair skills. Simple habits, such as getting dressed, getting up and getting out of bed, were difficult to perform. After months of collective assessment and training, the change in autonomy and independence are notable for the trader, who realized that the new condition did not need to limit him. 

“I got here and learned everything: how to move from the chair to the car, from the car to the chair, how to put on shoes, how to put on shorts. I learned a lot of things I didn't know here. The injury was a very bad moment for me, because I had always had a very busy life... Today, things are flowing but, in the beginning, it was very difficult”, he says. 

Reginaldo is not the only one who found gaining skills in handling wheelchairs a path to independence. This is demonstrated by the scientific work presented by ISD residents and preceptors at the Brazilian Congress of Functional Physiotherapy (COBRAFIN), which took place in September, in the city of Fortaleza (CE). 

The resident physiotherapists of the Multidisciplinary Residency program in Health Care for People with Disabilities, Jade Padilha and Ana Beatriz Oliveira, conducted research based on the experiences of group participants in using a wheelchair, with the aim of analyzing the impact of training of daily skills in quality of life and improving the rehabilitation process. 

They found that, with the support of the family and daily contact with friends and acquaintances who use wheelchairs, who shared information and exchanged experiences, Reginaldo and other members of the group, when well guided, could have the same autonomy as before the injury. 

At the beginning of the group's activities, the researchers administered a self-perception questionnaire on wheelchair management, which served to establish the skills and training frequency for each user. The perception was that, regardless of the time of injury, doubts or lack of knowledge about basic management skills were common, highlighting the need to include this type of practice in the therapeutic plan of the person in a wheelchair.

“Our objective is mainly to analyze the users’ profile and share this data with the assistance and care team, encouraging the inclusion of the user’s self-perception in the intervention plan. Furthermore, we seek to encourage the importance of training to acquire basic, intermediate and advanced skills and then take them to higher qualifications, a stage in which they begin to carry out activities such as sports and bodybuilding”, explains Ana Beatriz.

Practices that are part of the daily lives of people in wheelchairs are the focus of the management group; These are actions such as: transferring the body from the chair to the bed or to the toilet, overcoming obstacles and walking on uneven terrain, for example. According to Jade Padilha, the group aims to initiate and improve the training of these skills, socialization and teamwork, but, above all, efforts to ensure that learning is present in other spaces and moments in the participants' daily lives, from rehabilitation to personal and professional life.

“Sometimes we strengthen the individual and develop various other skills, and these are people who will spend the day in a wheelchair and many have no idea how to do this. So, we encourage this in everyday life, we make it go beyond here, so that other institutions and agents also realize the need for wheelchair skills”, points out Jade. 

For Reginaldo, his new skills with the instrument even pushed him to follow paths he had never thought of before, such as sport. Today, he intends to start his journey in parasports, which is also one of CER ISD's lines of care. “Since last year I have been moving, returning to all the movement I did before. I want to gradually return to what I did in the past, and also start in other paths, such as sport.”, he concludes. 

National Day of Struggle for People with Disabilities

On September 21st, National Day of Struggle for People with Disabilities is celebrated. The date was established by Law No. 11,133/2005, with the aim of raising awareness about the importance of developing means of including people with disabilities in society. This inclusion encompasses various areas of society: education, health, work, sport, culture and leisure. 

The coordinator of the ISD Specialized Rehabilitation Center, Camila Simão, highlights that the construction of an inclusive society must happen collectively, removing the physical and attitudinal barriers that prevent people with disabilities from accessing the rights guaranteed to all citizens. “One of the most important actions we need to take, which is health education, is to leave clinics and outpatient services to raise awareness in society about the need to remove barriers, especially attitudinal ones, to facilitate access for people with disabilities. to achieve the long-awaited social inclusion”, he highlights. 

Although the lack of accessibility of physical spaces is an obstacle to the full citizenship of people with disabilities, attitudinal barriers, that is, those that reduce the individual to the disability they have, ignoring their potential and reducing them to a stereotype, are also a major challenge that deserves to be highlighted in the public debate. “The attitudinal barrier is one of the most impactful and most hinders the real social participation and inclusion of people with disabilities in the contexts they want and need to be in”, he adds. 

ABOUT ISD

The Santos Dumont Institute is a Social Organization linked to the Ministry of Education (MEC) and includes the Edmond and Lily Safra International Neuroscience Institute and the Anita Garibaldi Health Education and Research Center, both in Macaíba. ISD's mission is to promote education for life, forming citizens through integrated teaching, research and extension actions, in addition to contributing to a fairer and more humane transformation of Brazilian social reality.