Experiences of Parents of Children with Overweight or Obesity in Primary Health Care: Protocol for Systematic Review of the Qualitative Literature
Published 2025-06-19
Keywords
- ediatric Obesity; Parents; Primary Health Care; Life Experiences; Systematic Review
How to Cite
Copyright (c) 2024 Sara Lobo, Sara Martins, Sónia Borges Rodrigues
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Abstract
Introduction
Obesity is a multifactorial, chronic complex disease that increases non-communicable diseases risk, influences the quality of living, and has increased in recent years.1
In child health surveillance, in primary health care, professionals have the opportunity to provide obesity prevention and management care.1,2 However, fear of disrupting the therapeutic relationship, time constraints, and professional training gaps are common limitations.3 To optimize this care, it is important to develop synergies with families2 and consider their experiences.
A preliminary research in PROSPERO, JBI Evidence synthesis and the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews confirmed the lack of completed or ongoing systematic reviews on the topic.
Objective
To identify, critically evaluate, and synthesize the best qualitative evidence on the experience of parents of children with overweight or obesity in primary health care.
Methods
Literature review of qualitative evidence following the JBI methodology, the PRISMA and ENTREQ recommendations. The review will conduct a systematic search of the MEDLINE, CINAHL and Pubmed databases, and will consider qualitative studies in English and Portuguese from the last 10 years. The participants are parents and caregivers of children with overweight and obesity children (from birth to 18 years old), the phenomenon of interest is their experiences, and the context is primary health care. Data extraction will be performed using a standardized JBI data extraction instrument, and data synthesis will be performed through meta-aggregation. The confidence of the synthesized results will be assessed using the ConQual approach. The process will involve at least two independent reviewers.
Results and Conclusions
This review is expected to contribute to the development of policies and therapeutic interventions, emphasizing the centrality of the person in improving the quality of health care.