Acompanhamento nutricional: por que os pacientes abandonam?

Abstract

Many people today are being influenced to seek a healthy diet, with a view to achieving health, which is why they are increasingly looking for professional nutritionists to help in this process. However, many of them have expectations regarding their contact with this professional, believing that this can alleviate the insecurities that cross their relationship with food. Based on this relationship between expectation and reality, many patients choose to give up treatment. Thus, the objective of this study is to identify the reasons that contribute to the abandonment of nutritional monitoring of patients treated at a Clinical School of Nutrition. This is a cross-sectional, descriptive research, with mixed methods, carried out remotely with patients over 18 years of age, who dropped out of nutritional monitoring at the Clínica Escola de Nutrição of UFRN/FACISA, located in the city of Santa-Cruz/RN . Data collection consisted of surveying sociodemographic information, followed by telephone contact and interviews with all patients who dropped out of nutritional monitoring, thus resulting in 35 research participants. For analysis of quantitative data, absolute and relative frequencies were established in SPSS® 20.0 software. Qualitative data were analyzed using inductive thematic analysis. The data found indicated a predominance of females (71.4%), in addition to showing that the factors that most contributed to dropping out of follow-up were: the daily routine, the difficulty of planning and preparing the meal plan, as well as the lack of of time to attend the follow-up. However, 91.4% of the participants showed interest in a new nutritional follow-up. Conclusion: Thus, it is worth emphasizing the need for “flexibility” in nutritional monitoring, aiming at adapting to the patient's reality, as well as the importance and sensitivity of the professional nutritionist towards this whole process, aiming to train the “patient” , so that it is possible for them to make decisions about their food and health aspects.