WEIGHT MANAGEMENT & OBESITY
I can see many barriers preventing
GPs from engaging more in this area, so I’m aiming to break each barrier down one by one and see what happens.
QWhere does physical
activity come into all this?
It’s an equal half of the story and tremendously important to health in general, not just for weight. But once again, the level of confidence among many doctors is very low when it comes to talking about exercise. There’s also a perception that it’s
somebody else’s job. One of the things I’ve become increasingly interested in is how we divide up these complex agendas that actually relate to lots of different health professionals. If you had a heart problem, it’s very obvious you would be under a heart specialist. But it isn’t clear who things like weight and fitness sit under, so health professionals try and wiggle out of them and pass the buck to somebody else.
Q What can be done about that?
I think sharing the agenda is our real next step forward, and that’s one of the
reasons why I recently called for the formation of a Child Obesity Action Group (COAG). There are a huge number of health professionals who interact with children in all sorts of ways, and they’re all relevant and all do a little bit. Rather than hoping somebody will take responsibility for child obesity in its entirety, we all need to join forces and recognise how we link together. We need to recognise if somebody
else might already be doing a bit of our work, for example, but unless we convene and discuss these things, we’re not going to know. For instance, dentists do a huge
amount of health messaging about sugar and not eating between meals, which is hugely relevant to childhood obesity. And what about midwives? They have that important window when parents can’t wait to get more information on how to do things well. So we have this wonderful shared agenda. Why aren’t we sitting around the table together and making sure it’s all joined-up?
Q What is COAG hoping to achieve?
One big ambition, aside from getting the collaborative group working together in
the first place, is to explore how services can be developed to support the national child measuring programme. It’s currently just about measurement, and it’s a postcode lottery as to what child obesity services will be available in your area, if any. Since the Health and Social Care Act devolved responsibility to different localities, nobody has a handle on the national picture of child obesity services up and down the country, so it’s very difficult to co- ordinate approaches or establish a minimum standard of care.
involved in COAG? They probably should be, yes, but I think that has to come from Public Health England (PHE). Not everyone can afford to join a health club, so PHE needs look at how much we involve commercial activity groups, how much funding could be made available through the NHS and so on. There are some difficult topics to explore there. There’s also the big issue of how we
Q Shouldn’t physical
measure what public health might have funded. With physical activity, we don’t have any good way of demonstrating
activity providers be
Tackling obesity needs a collaborative approach, working with dentists, for example, who already encourage eating less sugar 66 Read Health Club Management online at
healthclubmanagement.co.uk/digital January 2015 © Cybertrek 2015
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