General practitioners' and district nurses' conceptions of the encounter with obese patients in primary health care

BMC Family Practice

Research Article

Lena M Hansson¹  Finn Rasmussen¹  Gerd I Ahlstrom² 

[1] Department of Public Health Sciences, Karolinska Institute, Norrbacka floor 5, 171 76, Stockholm, Sweden;The Swedish Institute for Health Sciences, Lund University, Box 187, 221 00, Lund, Sweden;

关键词: Obesity;    Obese Patient;    Primary Health Care;    Weight Management;    Obesity Treatment;   

DOI  :  10.1186/1471-2296-12-7

 received in 2010-09-05, accepted in 2011-02-19,  发布年份 2011

来源: Springer

【 摘 要 】

BackgroundPrimary health care specialists have a key role in the management of obesity. Through understanding how they conceive the encounter with patients with obesity, treatment may be improved. The aim of this study was thus to explore general practitioners' and district nurses' conceptions of encountering patients with obesity in primary health care.MethodData were collected through semi-structured interviews, and analysed using a phenomenographic approach. The participants were 10 general practitioners (6 women, 4 men) and 10 district nurses (7 women, 3 men) from 19 primary health care centres within a well-defined area of Sweden.ResultsFive descriptive categories were identified: Adequate primary health care, Promoting lifestyle change, Need for competency, Adherence to new habits and Understanding patient attitudes. All participants, independent of gender and profession, were represented in the descriptive categories. Some profession and gender differences were, however, found in the underlying conceptions. The general staff view was that obesity had to be prioritised. However, there was also the contradictory view that obesity is not a disease and therefore not the responsibility of primary health care. Despite this, staff conceived it as important that patients were met with respect and that individual solutions were provided which could be adhered to step-by-step by the patient. Patient attitudes, such as motivation to change, evasive behaviour, too much trust in care and lack of self-confidence, were, however, conceived as major barriers to a fruitful encounter.ConclusionsFindings from this study indicate that there is a need for development and organisation of weight management in primary health care. Raising awareness of staff's negative views of patient attitudes is important since it is likely that it affects the patient-staff relationship and staff's treatment efforts. More research is also needed on gender and profession differences in this area.

【 授权许可】

Unknown   
© Hansson et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. 2011. 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.