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Researchers from UCL are calling on medical professionals to adopt ‘a health-focused weight-inclusive’ approach to tackling weight stigma in healthcare settings.
Weight stigma, or weight blaming, is a form of discrimination that is based on stereotypes and prejudices about people who are either overweight or obese.
Weight stigma has been shown to increase risk of developing obesity, and healthcare is one of the most common contexts where weight stigmatisation occurs.
Physicians have been reported as the second most common source of weight stigma and discrimination and research shows that doctors and nurses often unconsciously ‘weight-shame’ people.
Weight shaming can cause feelings of humiliation, which can lead people to put more weight on and can deter them from attending future medical appointments.
To look at this issue in more depth, researchers at UCL conducted a review to evaluate weight stigma reduction strategies in healthcare practice and healthcare education, with a view to provide recommendations for interventions, learning, and research.
Weight-inclusive approaches to education in healthcare were effective in challenging stereotypes and improving attitudes
The systematic review, published in the journal Obesity Reviews, looked at data from 3,773 international research articles. This included 25 weight stigma interventional initiatives, comprising a total of 3,554 participants.
Through this analysis, researchers identified that weight-inclusive approaches to education in healthcare were effective in challenging stereotypes and improving attitudes. Such methods included ethics seminars discussing patient experiences, embedding virtual story-telling of patient case studies, or empathy evoking activities in the curriculum, such as following a calorie restricted diet or participation in clinical encounters with patients living with overweight and obesity.
Other methods, such as video presentations and short lectures, were not found to be as effective in improving attitudes in the long term.
Lead author, Dr Anastasia Kalea (UCL Division of Medicine) said the findings highlight that “more needs to be done to educate healthcare professionals and medical students on the complex range of factors regulating body weight, and to address weight stigma, explicitly emphasising its prevalence, origins, and impact.”
She explains: “Sadly healthcare, including general practice, is one of the most common settings for weight stigmatisation and we know this acts as a barrier to the services and treatments that can help people manage weight.
“A common misconception among medics and others, is that obesity is caused by factors within a person’s control, focusing on diet and exercise without recognition of, for instance, social and environmental determinants.”
Moving towards a ‘health-focused weight-inclusive’ approach
As a result of these findings, the authors of the study are calling on medical schools in both the UK and globally to ensure effective and sustained weight-inclusive teaching is embedded in medical doctor training and is added to the continuing professional development of clinicians.
Dr Kalea added: “Weight stigma needs to be addressed early on and continuously throughout healthcare education and practice, by teaching the genetic and socioenvironmental determinants of weight, by discussing the sources, impact and recognising the implications of stigma on treatment.
“We need to move away from a solely weight-centric approach to healthcare to a health-focussed weight-inclusive one. And it is equally important to assess the effects of weight stigma in epidemiological research.”