Health advice and education given to overweight patients by primary care doctors and nurses: A scoping literature review

Abstract

Health advice for overweight patients in primary care has been a focus of obesity guidelines. Primary care doctors and nurses are well placed to provide evidence based preventive health advice. This literature review addressed two research questions: ‘When do primary care doctors and nurses provide health advice for weight management?’ and ‘What health advice is provided to overweight patients in primary care settings?’The study was conducted in the first half of 2018 and followed Arksey and O'Malley (2005) five stage framework to conduct a comprehensive scoping review. The following databases were searched: Emcare, Ovid, Embase, The Cochrane library, Proquest family health, Health source (nursing academic), Joanna Briggs Institute EBP database, Medline, PubMed, Rural and remote, Proquest (nursing and allied health) and TRIP using search term parameters. Two hundred and forty-eight (248) articles were located and screened by two reviewers.Twenty-three research papers met the criteria and data were analysed using a content analysis method. The results show that primary care doctors and nurses are more likely to give advice as BMI increases and often miss opportunities to discuss weight with overweight patients. Body Mass Index (BMI) is often wrongly categorised as overweight, when in fact it is in the range of obese, or not recorded and when health advice is given, it can be of poor quality. Few studies on this topic included people under 40 years, practice nurses as the focus and those with a BMI of 25–29.9 without a risk factor. A ‘toolkit’ approach to improve advice and adherence to evidence based guidelines should be explored in future research. Keywords: Health advice, Health prevention, Obese, Overweight, BMI, General practitioner, GP, Nurse, Practice nurse, Primary care