Characteristics and counseling strategies for physical activity used by primary health care professionals

This study aim to describe the char-acteristics and strategies of counseling for physi-cal activity used by Primary Health Care (PHC) professionals. A survey was carried out with 587 (85.4% women) health professionals who work in PHC in Florianopolis, in the state of Santa Cata-rina, southern Brazil. Counseling carried out in the last 12 months was considered. Operational aspects related to counseling practices and strate-gies used for counseling were evaluated. The fre-quency of physical activity guidance was 86.2% (95%CI = 83.2-88.8%). Counseling was charac-terized as a brief practice, carried out in individ-ual consultations, aimed at adults and the older adults and people with morbidities. The most used strategy was to guide users to participate in physical activity groups at the Health Center (89.5%) and in relation to the 5As method, giving some "advice" was the most used strategy (99.0%) and the least used. used was to follow strategies (22.6%). Counseling for physical activity has been based on a brief practice, carried out in individu-al consultations and focused on people with mor-bidities and on adults and the elderly. The strate-gies used do not seem to cover the full care of the advised users.