Exploring the Perceived Capabilities of Health Professionals in Providing Health Education and Counseling to Their Clients: A Qualitative Study

How health care providers perceive their capabilities affects their performance of their educational duties. The present study was conducted on health and treatment staff to explain the experiences of health care providers regarding their perceived capabilities in delivering health education. The present study is a qualitative study with a conventional content analysis approach, which was conducted in different environments, including hospitals, doctors’ offices, and health centers in Isfahan, Iran, using purposive sampling in 2017 - 2018. Thirty-two participants with an average experience of 8 years of work in health centers took part in this study. The data were analyzed using the MAXQDA software simultaneously with data collection. Two themes emerged: (1) the ability to gain the audience’s trust, with the two main categories of personal characteristics and communication skills, and (2) professional capabilities with the two main categories of attitude to the profession and professional conversance. Some subcategories of both themes acted as both augmenting and diminishing factors affecting the perceived capabilities of the health care providers. An individual has about his own personal characteristics, communication skills, and professional capabilities, which play central roles in the formation of their self-concepts. By enhancing these two factors via interventions based on the findings of such qualitative studies, the health care providers’ self-concept related to health education can be improved.