Sammanfattning
An increasing number of overweight people in Denmark causes still more patients to be hospitalized with accompanying illnesses. This article identifies the challenges that the nurse experiences when nursing the bariatric patients and shows how the nurse’s attitude influences the approach to these patients. The aim is hereby to obtain a larger understanding of the source of these challenges and their importance for the implemented nursing. The preconception of the nurse and her attitudes and actions appear to be dominated by a scientific paradigm, resulting in a behaviour regulating nursing. This article demonstrates that stigmatization is a fundamental element at play in the relation between nurse and patient. The nurse needs to adapt a more nuanced approach to understanding the bariatric patient in order to increase the quality of the nursing offered to this group of patients.