Broaching overweight and obesity at maternity and child health clinics

Abstract

Aims The aim was to describe the experiences of nurses in broaching the issue of overweight and obesity at maternity and child health clinics. Background The mother's obesity and excessive weight gain during pregnancy and rapid weight gain in early childhood increase the risk of obesity of the newborn baby both in childhood and throughout life. Attention must be paid to the prevention of weight gain in families already during pregnancy and before school age. Methods Informants were nurses working at maternity and child health clinics (N = 28). The qualitative data were collected by a focus group interview in spring 2016 and analysed using inductive content analysis. Findings The nurses interviewed considered it their duty to broach the issue and felt that they have sufficient courage to bring up overweight. They sometimes found it frustrating to talk about overweight and obesity, because families do not commit themselves to making lifestyle changes, and changes happen slowly. Nurses found the lasting relationship with families helpful for bringing up overweight. Conclusion Nurses need more broaching skills, more training, supervising and tools for bringing up overweight and obesity with client families. The continuity of care in primary health care supports bringing up overweight.

An emotionally loaded subject – parents experiences when CHC-nurses introduce a conversation related to their child being overweight

“…It is possible that raising the subject without responsiveness might hurt a caring relationship (Halldórsdóttir, 1996). Although, when there was a caring relationship and the parents trusted their nurse, the conversation was not perceived as negative, which agrees with previous research (Mäenpää and Vuori, 2021;Halldórsdóttir, 1996). It also appears that a caring relationship is not necessarily affected negatively by talking about being overweight in childhood, which was something CHC-nurses feared according to Sjunnestrand et al (2019).…”

“…Nearly 100% of the families attend, and during routine check-ups CHC-nurses assess children's development and track their growth and give customized advice to the families when needed (Tell, 2023). Giving support to families with overweight children can be considered di cult by CHC-nurses (Mäenpää and Vuori, 2021;Sjunnestrand et al, 2019). They nd it hard to identify and assess overweight in children (Isma et al, 2013) and are afraid to hurt the parent's feelings (Castor et al, 2021), parents tend to feel offended when informed about their child's overweight, and doubt whether it's true (Eli et al, 2022;Hardy et al, 2019).…”