Perspectives of a Family Physician Focus Group on the Implementation of Community Health Nurses

Background The announcement in the coalition agreement (2021–2025) to implement new professional fields in primary health care served as an opportunity to conduct a focus group interview with family physicians in a region with impending shortage of health care professionals. Community health nurses (CHN) may be employed in both community health care and primary care settings and thus interface with primary care physicians. The goal was to examine implications of the implementation on family medicine. Methods To evaluate the current perspective of family physicians on the reorganization of non-medical job profiles, a focus group interview was conducted with seven family physicians from Saxony-Anhalt in February 2022. The analysis was based on the criteria of qualitative content analysis according to Kuckartz (2018) using the software QDA Miner Lite (version 2.0.8). Results The focus group discussion highlighted that non-medical staff already perform many CHN activities. The feedback men-tioned several tasks that would relieve the workload of the physicians (patient support for video consultations, communi-cation with nursing services, etc.). However, linking CHNs as directly as possible to physician practices is considered essen-tial. The main concern is the establishment of new interfaces in healthcare if the CHNs are not coordinated via the physicians‘ offices. Conclusions Due to various challenges, the introduction of the new CHN job description is widely opposed by focus group interview participants when not connected to physician practices. Existing practice structures and processes should be enlarged, and opportunities to delegate tasks to non-physician practice staff expanded to achieve more efficient patient care. © Deutscher Ärzteverlag 2022.