cover story
Commercial slimming groups
best practice weight management
The
Denby report
by Nigel Denby Dietitian and Author
Delivering a clinical service to Hammersmith and Queen Charlotte's Hospital Women's Halth Clinic and acting as Nutrition Consultant for the Childbase Children's Nursery Group, Nigel also runs his own private practice specialising in Weight Management and PMS/IBS
With millions of potential custom- ers in the UK, weight management groups are, of course, big business and there are an endless number of ‘solutions’ and ‘remedies’ out there. This article aims to give an overview of what’s on offer from three commercial weight man- agement programmes and how they meet the NICE best practice guidelines.
As professional dietitians, we know that we simply can’t make an impact on the obesity and over- weight crisis in the UK on our own. The NHS doesn’t have the resources to meet the needs of the estimated 61 percent of UK adults who are overweight and 24 percent who are obese and with just 6,000 dietitians in the UK there just aren’t enough of us to go round.
The National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) rec- ognised the problem in 2006 when it published Guidance on the Preven- tion, Identification, Assessment and Management of Overweight and Obese Adults and Children. NICE
NHDmag.com June '10 - issue 55
made a series of practical recom- mendations, one of which was for primary care organisations and local authorities to recommend commercial weight management programmes which meet standards of best practice to patients. With millions of potential customers, weight management is big business and there are endless ‘solutions’ and ‘remedies’. As dietitians we can prob- ably weed out the ‘too good to be true solutions’ and ‘wacky remedies’ and steer our patients away from them. We’ll be familiar with some of the more credible ‘big players’ in commercial weight management. But, do we really know enough detail about how their weight loss plans are designed, the advice they give and what long-term support they offer their members so that we can make informed, specific recommendations to our patients? From my clinical practice, as well as working in the media, I have received positive and negative anecdotal feedback from patients about their experiences of commercial slimming organisations. While this information
isn’t empirically scientific, it gives another insight into how different organisations work in practice and can be helpful when matching a commercial organisation to an individual patient.
NICE criteria for best practice
NICE identified and defined stan-
dards of best practice that should be included in commercial weight management programmes that are recommended by health profes- sionals, so it seems prudent to use these as first line criteria to assess an organisation’s suitability. NICE best practice standards for
commercial weight management programmes - confirms the pro- grammes should: • help people assess their weight and decide on a realistic healthy target weight – usually a weight loss of five to 10 percent of the original weight;
• aim for a maximum weekly weight loss of 0.5-1kg;
• focus on long-term lifestyle changes rather than a short-term quick fix approach;
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