Difficulties in nutritional counseling and child growth follow-up: from a professional perspective

Introduction: Nutritional counseling and growth follow-up are priorities when providing care to children; however, these have not been completely incorporated into primary health care. Objective: To know the difficulties for providing nutritional counseling and child growth follow-up, from a professional healthcare perspective. Method: Qualitative study, using Donabedian as theoretical framework, developed by 53 professionals in the field of primary health care. Data was obtained from focal groups and submitted to content analysis. Results: The main difficulties for nutritional counseling were clustered in the category of ‘perceptions and beliefs related to child feeding’. The ‘problems of infrastructure and healthcare’ and ‘maintenance of the hegemonic medical model’ are the main difficulties for following-up growth. Final considerations: Besides investments in infrastructure, healthcare training is indispensable considering beliefs and professional experiences, so in fact, nutritional counseling and child growth follow-up are incorporated in primary health care.