Back to Search
Start Over
How often should general practitioners provide nutrition care to patients? A forecasting activity to determine the target frequency for chronic-disease management in Australia
- Source :
- Australian Journal of Primary Health. 22:383
- Publication Year :
- 2016
- Publisher :
- CSIRO Publishing, 2016.
-
Abstract
- Supporting patients to have healthy dietary behaviours contributes significantly to preventing and managing lifestyle-related chronic diseases. ‘Nutrition care’ refers to any practice provided by a health professional to support a patient to improve their dietary behaviours and subsequent health outcomes. Approximately 3% of consultations by Australian general practitioners (GPs) involve the provision of nutrition care. The aim of the present paper was to forecast the potential implications of a higher frequency of nutrition care by GPs. Evidence on the effect of improved dietary behaviours on chronic disease outcomes, number of Australian adults estimated to have poor dietary behaviours and effectiveness of GPs providing nutrition care were taken into consideration. Using hypertension as a case example, for GPs to provide nutrition care to all hypertensive adults who would benefit from improved dietary behaviours, GPs would need to provide nutrition care in a target rate of 4.85% of consultations or 4.5 million different patients each year. The target aligns with the existing priorities for supporting chronic-disease prevention and management in Australia by increasing the rate that brief lifestyle interventions are provided by primary health professionals. This conservative target presents a considerable challenge for GPs, support staff, researchers and policy makers, but can be used to inform future interventions to support nutrition care by GPs.
- Subjects :
- Male
medicine.medical_specialty
education
Psychological intervention
Clinical nutrition
Population health
03 medical and health sciences
0302 clinical medicine
Nursing
General Practitioners
Health care
medicine
Humans
030212 general & internal medicine
Medical nutrition therapy
Practice Patterns, Physicians'
Health economics
business.industry
030503 health policy & services
Health Policy
Public health
Australia
Public Health, Environmental and Occupational Health
Nutrition Assessment
Family medicine
Chronic Disease
Community health
Female
Nutrition Therapy
0305 other medical science
business
Forecasting
Subjects
Details
- ISSN :
- 14487527
- Volume :
- 22
- Database :
- OpenAIRE
- Journal :
- Australian Journal of Primary Health
- Accession number :
- edsair.doi.dedup.....831f58e58b8362fc7b9ee08764da68c3