A new study has highlighted the lack of child weight management support in England after it revealed that 77% of NHS trusts don’t even provide a service in the area.
The study was funded by the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) and collated data from Freedom of Information requests sent between March 2020 and 2021 – the researchers found that, of the 94% of trusts who responded to the requests, only 32 offered child weight management services.
Those 32 services included 36% of trusts in London, 32% in the North East and Yorkshire, and 4% in the Midlands; coincidentally, the West Midlands also has the highest prevalence of severe obesity according to data from the National Child Measurement Programme back in 2019/2020.
The study also shone a light on the lack of consistency in funding and eligibility criteria for children when accessing services, as well as the fact that multi-service and teaching trusts are more likely to provide this type of support compared to other acute trusts.
The researchers also discovered that there was no discernible standardisation of child weight management services in relation to how the desired outcomes are measured, the period of time set aside for follow-ups, and the length of intervention in general.
The study was led by researchers at the University of Bristol, who worked in conjunction with the team at the NIHR Bristol Biomedical Research Centre.
Dr Ruth Mears, Clinical Research Fellow from the Centre for Academic Primary Care at the University of Bristol, said: “One in five children in England is obese. The NHS trust services who provide services will only be able to reach a tiny number of children with obesity. There needs to be a clear and realistic national strategy outlining who should receive priority for obesity care."
Julian Hamilton-Shield, Professor in Diabetes and Metabolic Endocrinology at Bristol Medical School: Translational Health Sciences, added: “The lack of child weight management services suggests that many young people and their families will face inequality in access to care facilities.”
