If you are severely overweight, the Cardiff and Vale University Health Board insists that you go on weight management courses before undergoing non-urgent bariatric surgery. Their new policy states that you must have been ‘offered, accepted and completed weight management support’ before being added to the waiting list, unless you need emergency surgery, cancer treatment, or have weight-related hormone problems. However, this policy has sparked criticism.
Tam Fry, the spokesman for the National Obesity Forum, believes that the policy had not been thought through. He noted, ‘In the end, I think it is just wasting money because, of course, these courses are going to cost the NHS as well. We don’t know what the course is and whether, or how successful they will be. Then, during the course, the drop out rate may be quite high and you’ve wasted that money as well. Why bother to go through this, in my opinion.’
However, according to Dr Sharon Hopkins, director of public health at the health board, the policy supports patients’ wellbeing, helping them to get better outcomes from surgery. ‘We are working with them on things that we know affect those outcomes,’ she commented. ‘For example, if you had high blood pressure we would ask you to go on a course of blood pressure tablets…Patients would be quite happy to do that, because people understand very well that high blood pressure is not a good thing to have.’ She added, ‘Absolutely the same with weight management. Anything you can do to help you have a better weight prior to any surgery gives you a better outcome.’
Still, Fry argued that better results would come from a more radical approach to weight loss and wellness. ‘What these patients clearly need is bariatric surgery, which will be up to 40-50%. You are really just putting off the inevitable,’ he warned. ‘Our advice is that they should accept that the patient is extremely obese, act promptly now and that will start to save volumes of money for the NHS in the future. What you are really doing is putting a three-month barrier in their way – what is the purpose of that? Give them the surgery now, have it done and dusted, and they and the NHS will benefit in the long run.’
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