Child Health Handbook in Primary Care: perspectives of family health professionals and mothers.

Abstract

Objective: To understand the use of the Child Health Handbook in Primary Care from the perspective of family health professionals and mothers.

Method: Qualitative research, grounded in Symbolic Interactionism, with 25 family health professionals and 11 mothers, in a city in Northeast Brazil. The data were collected in the months of September and October 2020, through semi-structured interviews and submitted to inductive thematic analysis.

Results: The following thematic units were developed: "Use of the Child Health Handbook in Primary Care: the role of nursing", which revealed nurses as the professionals who most frequently observe and fill out the records in the handbook and guide mothers; and "Obstacles to the use of the Child Health Handbook in Primary Care", which highlighted the weaknesses in academic training and the unavailability of the handbook as obstacles to its use.

Conclusion: Nurses play a central role in monitoring child development using the Child Health Handbook in Primary Care. The work of nurses, as important members of the multiprofessional team, has the potential to give new meaning to this instrument for other professionals, and for mothers, positively impacting child development.