Challenges faced by nurses regarding the use of herbal medicines in primary health care

Abstract

Medicinal plants are part of human history and are used to cure physical illnesses. They are considered plant species, cultivated or not, with therapeutic purposes. Phytotherapy, in turn, is a simple and natural form of treatment, which aims to treat or prevent diseases through the preparation of plants or the active principles that can be extracted from them. As a result, the use of medicinal plants and phytotherapeutics ends up being a worldwide practice; however, health professionals still have difficulty in guiding PHC users regarding the indications for the use of medicinal plants and phytotherapeutics. The study aimed to develop an integrative research seeking to understand the challenges faced by nurses regarding the use of medicinal plants and phytotherapeutics in Primary Health Care. The methodology is an integrative research, carried out in the databases indexed in the Virtual Health Library (BVS) through the Latin American and Caribbean Literature in Health Sciences (LILACS), Medical Literature Analysis and Retrieval System Online (MEDLINE) and Nursing Database (BDENF). The guiding question was: What are the challenges faced by nurses regarding the use of medicinal plants and phytotherapeutics in Primary Health Care? To search for the selected articles, the following health descriptors were used: Nurses. Phytotherapeutics. Medicinal Plants. The crossings occurred through the use of the Boolean descriptor and. The results from the crossing of the BVS descriptors were 1,051 articles. After applying the inclusion and exclusion criteria, 95 studies were identified and, after careful reading of the abstracts, 7 articles were selected to compose the integrative review, of which 2 were published in 2021 and 1 was published in 2015, 2016, 2018, 2020 and 2022, respectively. It is concluded that the integrative review was extremely important to have access to the current scenario of nurses working in PHC and how this relationship occurs between nurses, the use of PICS and the receptivity of primary care users. Thus, it is clear that there is still a long way to go in terms of training aimed at the rational use of medicinal plants and phytotherapeutics by health professionals, especially nurses, who may have a very promising area of activity in this field, since approximately 80% of the world's population chooses medicinal plants as a form of treatment.