HOW DO THE PHYSIOTHERAPISTS AT A SPECIALIZED REHABILITATION CENTER PERCEIVE THE CARE NETWORK AND THE FAMILY?

The Specialized Rehabilitation Centers (CER) are the points in the network responsible for promoting attention and care for People with Disabilities (PwD), but their work goes beyond this task, being an important place for approaching families of PwD and a privileged locus for articulating the care network. Health care networks (RAS), more specifically, Care Networks for PwD, are one of the ways to promote comprehensive, longitudinal, and continuous care for PwD. In this way, professionals working in the CER, including physiotherapists, must be familiar with the management of articulation with networks. The physiotherapist is an agent within this web of care and the way he perceives the families of PwD and their interactions with the network can be fundamental for the establishment of practices that are expected in terms of the performance of professionals in the CER. To find out, through the set of individual experiences of physiotherapists, the senses and meanings attributed to the physiotherapist's relationships with the care network and with families. It is a qualitative, descriptive, and exploratory study, theoretically and methodologically supported by the content analysis proposed by Bardin. For this research, participant observation and interviews were adopted as techniques, guided by a previously defined script. The locating context of the research was a CER in the state of Paraíba - PB, where 13 physiotherapists from a Rehabilitation sector were interviewed. The study reveals that there is still a gap between the care currently provided by CER physiotherapists and the biopsychosocial approach. Physical therapists face difficulties in understanding and performing articulations with the network and centralize this role in the social worker. Regarding the family, they recognize the central role of the mother in care but have difficulty perceiving the burden on her and the need for a better division of care between family members, finally highlighting a utilitarian relationship with the family, required to support therapies, but away from discussions about the care provided to PwD. Family and Care Network are two fundamental elements for the work in the CER, but they are still opaque in the view of physiotherapists. Because the family is seen, sometimes, only in the figure of the mother and the hammock is an entity still little known by physiotherapists. The results of this work can be used in the permanent health education process at the CER to refl