At the age of 64, Maria Manuela Martins is an essential reference in Portuguese Nursing, particularly in research and teaching, areas that she passionately dedicates herself to at CINTESIS and at the Nursing School of Porto (ESEP). In CINTESIS she works as a researcher of the NursID group and at ESEP she is a coordinating professor and member of the General Council. Her life story is full of causes and inspiration.
She was born in a small village in Vila Nova de Famalicão, named Delães, the daughter of an accountant and a seamstress. The only family link to health comes from her great-grandmother who was a pharmacist. She studied at the Externato Delfim Ferreira – Riba D´Ave and at the Colégio D. Diogo de Sousa, a Catholic school located in Braga. There she completed her secondary education in a class where she was the only girl.
“In my class, there were 31 boys and I was the only girl. It was a very good experience, although it was difficult at first. Everyone had a lot of respect for me. The teachers called me Miss.” [laughs] She was always a student with good grades, with the exception of Introduction to Politics, in which she failed before April 25, 1974. “I was used to saying what I thought”, she justifies. No wonder she lived the “Carnation Revolution” with special joy. She even ran away from the nuns to celebrate.
Her parents wanted her to study medicine, she wanted architecture. It was only during the Civil Service that she decided she wanted to follow Nursing, despite the opposition of her parents. Yet, she studied a year of Architecture until she joined the Calouste Gulbenkian School of Nursing, in Braga, where she completed her graduate degree in 1979.
In January 1980, she started working at the São João de Deus Hospital, in Famalicão, where she stayed until 1991. She started as a “bedside nurse”. She worked as a specialist nurse in Rehabilitation and was the Head Nurse of the Medicine service, where she eventually created the department for training and the Human Resources House and implemented a number of pioneering projects in the country. She reached the top of her career. In 1991, she accepted the invitation to work as a professor at ESEP, where she had been teaching since 1985. She accumulated teaching with nursing and being the head of a hemodialysis clinic in Riba de Ave and helped to create, from scratch, the first Hospital of the group Trofa Saúde, in Trofa. Later, at the beginning of the new millennium, she stopped doing those activities to do a Ph.D. in Nursing Sciences at the University of Porto.
Before that, she had already taken several postgraduate courses, including the Nursing Services Administration Course, at ESECP, with a comparative work on the quality of care in two hospitals (an area where she also trained at the University of Rio de Janeiro, in Brazil, in 1983), and the Master in Design and Research in Social Services from the University of Extremadura (Spain), where she developed a study about the families of stroke patients.
At the invitation of the Directorate-General of Hospitals, she helped to implement, at the national level, the System of Classification of Patients by degrees of dependence on Nursing care and she was part of the Clinical Process Standardization project. She was a pioneer, as an instructor, in the discharge planning project, created in several pilot hospitals in order to prevent inappropriate hospitalizations and ensure continuity of care. She also worked in the project’s working group for the Northern Rehabilitation Center, Northern Regional Health Administration (ARS-Norte), and was part of the technical verification committee for hemodialysis units.
Research has always been present in her life. Her first work was on Nursing Care in paraplegic due to spinal cord injury and the appearance of urolithiasis. She was, then, at the Santo António Hospital, during the internship in the Rehabilitation Nursing specialty, in the 1980s. She has been a CINTESIS researcher for several years, coordinating several projects: “Promoting health in the family throughout the life cycle and transitions, […] from the paradigms to the operationalization of Nursing management […] and Personal Trainer for Health Management of Older People” (PT4Ageing), whose results will be adapted for remote application, due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
It was within the scope of PT4Ageing that her team developed a mat for gait and balance training (The Show Balance Walking) and socks/shoes (3S – Smart Safe Shoes) to prevent falls in the elderly. The latter was developed with the collaboration of the company Peúgas Carlos Maia, Lda (CMSOCKS) in Famalicão and CITEVE – Centro Tecnológico Têxtil e Roupas. Funding is now awaited to proceed with the manufacture of these innovative devices, whose patent she holds, together with those of the table games she has developed (“Giving voice to caregivers”).
Maria Manuela Martins has written and published several books, book chapters, and about a hundred scientific articles. She has received several awards and distinctions, including the Municipal Merit of Benemerence of the Municipality of Vila Nova de Famalicão, the homage of the Lírio Azul Movement for the work done in the defense of women, and the Maria de Lurdes Sales Luís Award (2018) of the Portuguese Association of Specialized Nurses in Rehabilitation Nursing for her work in promoting equal opportunities, the rights of people with disabilities and the exercise of citizenship.
She considers herself a woman of causes, refusing certain labels. “I don’t consider myself a feminist, but an advocate for women’s rights. I recognize that I am very critical of the society that discriminates against us. A woman often has to make twice as much effort as a man to get to the same place. But we are also at fault because we don’t have that culture and because women continue to educate boys to win and girls to be submissive,” she regrets.
In the balance of a lifetime, Maria Manuela Martins has a clear conscience. “I didn’t miss any opportunities. I have worked a lot, almost crazy, but I have acquired a lot of knowledge and experience that still support a lot of my work today”, she says. She is particularly proud of the excellent relationship with her students and is thrilled to see them “to spread their wings”.
As a specialist nurse in Rehabilitation, she admits that there is a long way to go, in Portugal, in defending the rights of people with disabilities. “These people are spoken of as poor people, they want to give them subsidies. But what is needed is to provide them with the conditions for an adapted job, in a dignified way. This is, for me, very great anguish. I think that society has not evolved in the sense of respecting people with differences. There is talk of protecting them, but they don’t need protection, they need conditions to exercise their rights and to live well in their condition. This is not what happens on a daily basis, even in health organizations”, she says in sadness.
Politics has been an instrument in the struggle for the causes she embraces. She was a councilor for the Municipality of Vila Nova de Famalicão in the previous term, by PSD. She is currently a Local Adviser for Equality, constantly giving opinions, with the support of a group that includes professionals from various areas. This resulted, for example, in a Manual of Good Practices on Violence throughout the Life Cycle. “I only get involved in politics to defend my ideas and causes. Who is in charge is the one who is in politics and, if we are not in these forums, we will never be heard”, she reinforces.
She was not the architect she once dreamed of being, but she maintains a close collaboration with several architects, namely in the Master in Rehabilitation at ESEP, where she teaches several curricular units, and in the “design” of patient-friendly health units, always with the objective to overcome social and architectural barriers in health, both for patients and workers.
“We nurses are more sensitive to details that architects do not value. There are things that are often overlooked, such as, for example, enough space in bathrooms. Although it is clear in the law, you cannot imagine the mistakes that are still made. But there are other errors, not to mention the lack of materials, such as elevators or transfers for patients. In other countries, nurses do not raise patients except using technology for that purpose. There are many new solutions that are not very expensive and are not yet in use in our hospitals. Sometimes more is spent on a painting than on something that gives comfort to the patients”, she condemns.
As for the future, she continues to make plans. A lot of plans. Always with contagious energy and a permanent smile on her lips.
1-year Ambition?
I am about to retire from teaching, but I want to continue investigating. I would like to continue to actively belong to CINTESIS and maintain my international research contacts.
10-year Ambition?
At 75, I want to be a happy woman, pushing the world. I see myself doing research. As long as I have the capacity, at least I want to make others think. If I don’t have the ability to move, at least I want to get others to move. 10 years from now, I hope to be a good spirit.
I also see myself maintaining activity at the Portuguese Association of Nursing Managers, the Portuguese Association of Rehabilitation Nurses, and the Portuguese Magazine of Rehabilitation Nursing, as chief editor.
Life Beyond Research
I am creating in my workshop (painting, making handicrafts, imagining pieces, making drawings). I make necklaces, earrings, smaller things, which I do just to give away. Even in my dreams, I’m designing pieces. For me, the day should have more hours. So I am very organized. I organize my day very well on a to-do list, and I do my best to achieve my goals, but I try to diversify and have time to rest. I don’t usually get rested by sleeping. I love to walk, with my husband. I can’t be quiet in the same place. We get into our motorhome and go around the world. We do thematic trips. The first trip of this kind was to Romania after reading “The Witch of Portobello”, by Paulo Coelho. This was the first year that I did not travel abroad. I see myself traveling a lot in the coming years.