General practitioners’ experiences of being involved in local public health work in Norway. A qualitative study

AIM: The aim was to explore how general practitioners experienced being involved in local public health work and how they worked with prevention and health promotion clinically after the introduction of the Public Health Act in 2012. DESIGN, SETTING AND SUBJECTS: Qualitative study with focus groups interviews with 18 GPs from different municipalities in Norway. RESULTS: The GPs said that they either had not at all or only to a limited extent been involved in local public health work in their municipalities. They reported finding it hard to prioritize individual disease prevention and health promotion in their clinical work. GPs thought of health promotion as something that mainly concerned healthy people at a group level. CONCLUSIONS: Based on the experiences of the GPs in this study, there is a gap between governmental expectations to the role of GPs in public health, and how it works in practice. KEY POINTS: With the Norwegian Public Health Act launched in 2012, GPs were expected to contribute to better population health in their clinical work and as data providers to local public health surveillance. The GPs interviewed in this study said they had not been involved in local public health work, and they found it hard to give disease prevention and health promotion priority in their clinical work. GPs expressed various perceptions of what prevention and health promotion entails.