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Background: Pulmonary rehabilitation aims to support self-management strategies and behaviour change in patients with COPD, which requires an interaction between the patients and healthcare professionals.

Aim: The aim was to explore how patients with COPD interact with primary care, and how they experience this interaction.

Methods: The study was conducted in primary care in northern Sweden. Interviews were performed with patients with COPD (n=13) with varied disease severity, symptoms, sex and age, from four primary care centres. The interviews were analysed with grounded theory.

Results: The analysis ended up in a process of becoming a more active patient with COPD, moving back and forth between different stages of interaction with primary care. The category building self-esteem with empowering support comprises factors that facilitated this process, such as having a positive spirit, experiences of availability, continuity and regular contacts in primary care, along with a good support where the patients felt respected.

The simultaneous and conflicting category struggling with the stigma and threat of COPD captures factors inhibiting the process such as the patients’ fear of dyspnea and death, along with feelings of shame and guilt, the low status of COPD and disempowering support from primary care.

Conclusions: The interaction with primary care could be seen as an ongoing, flexible empowering process for patients with COPD, affected by both inhibiting and facilitating factors. These results could help primary care to empower patients with COPD and facilitate their social process of becoming more active and in control of their disease by using the facilitating factors and decreasing the inhibiting factors.