Obstacles to the prevention of overweight and obesity in the context of child health care in Sweden

BMC Family Practice

Research Article

Margareta Östman¹  Anna-Karin Dykes²  Gabriella E Isma³  Ann-Cathrine Bramhagen⁴  Gerd Ahlstrom⁵ 

[1] Department of Care Sciences, Malmö University, Faculty of Health and Society, Malmö, Sweden;Department of Care Sciences, Malmö University, Faculty of Health and Society, Malmö, Sweden;Department of Health Sciences, Lund University, Lund, Sweden;Department of Health Sciences, Health Sciences Centre (HSC), Box 157, Baravägen 3, SE-221 00, Lund, Sweden;Department of Care Sciences, Malmö University, Faculty of Health and Society, Malmö, Sweden;Lund University, Faculty of Medicine, The Vårdal Institute (The Swedish Institute for Health Sciences), Lund, Sweden;Department of Care Sciences, Malmö University, Faculty of Health and Society, Malmö, Sweden;Skånes University Hospital, Malmö, Sweden;Lund University, Faculty of Medicine, The Vårdal Institute (The Swedish Institute for Health Sciences), Lund, Sweden;Department of Health Sciences, Lund University, Lund, Sweden;

关键词: Child;    Nurses;    Obesity;    Overweight;    Perceptions;    Preventive work;    Primary care;    Qualitative research;   

DOI  :  10.1186/1471-2296-14-143

 received in 2013-03-07, accepted in 2013-09-19,  发布年份 2013

来源: Springer

【 摘 要 】

BackgroundOverweight and obesity in younger children could better be brought in focus through a deeper understanding of how Child Health Care nurses (CHC-nurses) perceive their work with the problems of overweight at the CHC Centers. The aim of this study was to elucidate the CHC-nurses conceptions of their preventive work with childhood overweight and obesity in Child Health Care.MethodA qualitative study, based on open-ended interviews, involving 18 CHC-nurses strategically selected from 17 CHC Centres in the southern part of Sweden using a phenomenographic approach.ResultsTwo categories of description emerged from the data: (i) Internal obstacles to the CHC- nurses’ work with overweight in children and (ii) External obstacles to the management of overweight in children. The CHC-nurses conceived their work with overweight in Child Health Care to be complicated and constrained by several obstacles depending on the nurses’ personal priorities, knowledge, responsibility and the absence of resources and cooperation, as well as the lack of uniform guidelines for preventing and managing childhood overweight and further a deficient management organisation.ConclusionNurses’ attention to monitoring overweight in children, and their initiative for prevention, is based on their conceptions of the obstacles that hinder them in their efforts. An increased awareness of the CHC-nurses conceptions of the priorities, their sense of responsibility and prevention practices is warranted. If measures in this direction are not taken there is a growing risk that overweight children will pass through the CHC without any formal recognition of their situation. There is an indication that the present level of the CHC-nurses’ preventive work with childhood overweight has room for improvement in several areas. It is suggested that the specialist education of these health care professionals should be supplemented and that organisation of the management of childhood overweight should be also revised at the primary health care level.

【 授权许可】

Unknown   
© Isma et al.; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. 2013. This article is published under license to BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.