A challenging balancing act to engage children and their families in a healthy lifestyle – Nurses' experiences of child‐centred health dialogue in child health services in Sweden

Aims and objectives To describe nurses' experiences of a child‐centred family guided intervention of obesity tested within the child health services targeting children identified with overweight and their caregivers. Background Interventions aiming to support families towards a healthier lifestyle can lead to decreased risk of overweight evolving into obesity in a child. At the same time, nurses have found dialogues on weight challenging and may therefore avoid them. Design Qualitative descriptive inductive design following content analysis applying to the COREQ guidelines. Methods Content analysis was used to analyse 13 individual semi‐structured interviews with nurses in the child health service in Sweden after completed training in CCHD, including how to facilitate the dialogue with the use of illustrations. Results The theme Health dialogue about weight is a challenging balancing act facilitated by a supportive intervention emerged through eight subcategories in three main categories. Nurses experienced that CCHD with children identified with overweight and their caregivers provoked an emotional response both for themselves and for the caregivers of the child. The training in child‐centred health dialogues promoted the nurses' work with structure and professionalism, as the nurses carefully took tentative steps to engage the family for a healthy lifestyle. Conclusions Emotional and practical challenges in performing CCHD still remained among nurses after customised training, which might comprise the child's rights to be involved in his or her own care when the child was identified as overweight. However, training for nurses, including lectures and tutorials, was found to increase the quality and professionalism of performing CCHD by providing structure, tools and tutorial support. Relevance to clinical practice Customised training and illustrations can support nurses when performing a structured intervention such as child‐centred health dialogues.