Purpose: With the obesity epidemic ever increasing, the purpose of this quality improvement project is to assess if Veteran’s Administration (VA) primary care providers have knowledge of and/or application barriers of the Veteran’s Administration/Department of Defense Clinical Practice Guideline for Screening and Management of Overweight and Obesity (SMOOG) in the VA primary care clinic in southern Arizona.
Background: The prevalence of obesity seen in adults in the U.S. escalated from 15% to 34%, which is more than double from 1980 to 2008. Active military and Veterans obesity rates rose in similar fashion. The implementation of practice guidelines is critical to effective treatment to counteract the rising rates of overweight and obesity. Adherence to clinical practice guidelines often remains low causing an omission of therapies recommended in the guidelines.
Methods: This quality improvement project used a descriptive methodology. Initially, SMOOG was evaluated using the AGREE II instrument. Next, a survey was administered to primary care providers to identify provider knowledge of and barriers to utilization of the SMOOG guidelines. Inclusion criteria for this study are: VA employed primary care provider and practicing primary care for at least 1 year. The 20-question survey measured providers’ knowledge and perceptions of their use of the VA/DoD SMOOG.
Results: Evaluation using the AGREE II tool revealed the lowest possible quality scores observed in the Applicability domain. Based upon the results of the evaluation SMOOG is recommended for use with modifications specifically improving its applicability. Fifteen primary care providers participated in the survey. The results revealed that few primary care providers use SMOOG in clinical practice and barriers exist to implementation of SMOOG.
Conclusions: Assessing providers’ knowledge, perceptions, and barriers to SMOOG provides insight towards the next steps in addressing the rising prevalence of obesity among U.S. Veterans. An appraisal of SMOOG revealed that the guideline was developed with a high quality in the areas of evidence and clear presentation, but is clearly deficient in its applicability of implementation of the recommendations. The data obtained serves as an initial step to inform future research into synthesizing and guiding an implementation strategy.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:arizona.edu/oai:arizona.openrepository.com:10150/626678 |
| Date | January 2018 |
| Creators | Chua, Justin, Chua, Justin |
| Contributors | Daly, Patricia, Daly, Patricia, Moore, Ki, Pacheco, Christy |
| Publisher | The University of Arizona. |
| Source Sets | University of Arizona |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text, Electronic Dissertation |
| Rights | Copyright © is held by the author. Digital access to this material is made possible by the University Libraries, University of Arizona. Further transmission, reproduction or presentation (such as public display or performance) of protected items is prohibited except with permission of the author. |
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