New research has shown that front-line NHS staff feel that there is nothing they can do to reduce levels of obesity amongst children. GPs and practice nurses reported that there were limits on what they could do to make an impact on a problem they described as being primarily social.
NHS staff said that a time pressures, parental reluctance to address their children’s problems and a lack of treatment options made their job so hard they had little effect. While Xenical and Reductil are fairly widely prescribed to obese adults by GPs, they are not recommended for use by under-18s.
Currently a little less than a third of adults in the UK are obese and that figure is expected to rise sharply over the next few years. About the same amount of children are also overweight – experts estimate that about 27% of them have weight problems.
Obesity is a medical problem and can have grave consequences for health, but NHS staff say that there were usually more pressing problems to deal with when a child visits their doctor. The medical staff also said that unless the weight was directly related to the health problem that caused the visit, they felt uncomfortable bringing it up.
They also warned that when they do see a child face to face and spot a weight problem, a lack of follow-up services means that there is little that can be done to help.
Dr. Katrina Turner, who lead the study, said that the children visiting their GPs was only “the tip of the iceberg” and called for there to be a re-examination of healthy food, where children can play and how much exercise there is on the school curriculum.
A Department of Health spokesperson said that they did not expect GPs and other primary health care professionals to solve the problem of child obesity on their own.