How to Support Child Healthcare Nurses in Sweden to Promote Healthy Lifestyle Behaviors from the Start of Life.

Matilda Ersson,Gerd Almquist-Tangen,Kylie D Hesketh,Maria Henström,Christine Delisle Nyström

doi:10.3390/children8080696

Matilda Ersson, Gerd Almquist-Tangen + Show 3 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3390/children8080696

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Abstract

Child healthcare (CHC) nurses have a key role in promoting and supporting healthy lifestyle behaviors from a young age. Thus, this study aims to investigate the perspectives of CHC nurses regarding discussing food introduction, physical activity/active play, and screen time with parents; explore facilitators and barriers influencing the discussion of healthy lifestyle behaviors with parents; and explore the perspectives of CHC nurses regarding a complementary program to promote healthy lifestyle behaviors from the start of life. A total of fifteen nurses participated in semi-structured interviews, which were recorded, transcribed verbatim, and analyzed using thematic analysis. There were four themes that were generated: parental needs; facilitators and barriers; parental groups; and future working methods. This study found that CHC nurses have seen an increase in the need for support among today’s parents. Time, the need to tailor information, and confidence to address sensitive topics were perceived as the largest barriers during daily work for the nurses. Furthermore, large variations in parental groups were found. Finally, the CHC nurses displayed a willingness and openness to change and develop current working methods using digital solutions. These solutions could possibly ease the workload and at the same time, support parents to create healthy lifestyle behaviors from the start of their child’s life.

Highlights

There were four themes that were generated from the thematic analysis: (i) parental needs, (ii) facilitators and barriers, (iii) parental groups, and (iv) future working methods (Figure 1)
“I feel that you need to give more support to the parents today. They are more insecure about their parenting role than I experienced when I started as a CHC nurse 20 years ago.” (Nurse 10)
The aim of this study was to investigate the perspectives of CHC nurses regarding discussing food introduction, physical activity/active play, and screen time with Swedish parents as well as to explore facilitators and barriers influencing the discussion of healthy lifestyle behaviors with parents of infants

Summary

Introduction

The first 1000 days of life (i.e., the time point from conception until 2 years of age) has been found to be a pivotal time in a child’s life, where lifestyle choices and behaviors can have lifelong consequences [1]. As lifestyle behaviors have been found to be established in infancy (i.e., 0–2 years) and track into early childhood [2,3], it is important to promote the development of healthy lifestyle behaviors. These are especially important to target early in life, as it gets progressively harder to break established behaviors with age [1]

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