Released 14 June 2024
Request:
- Do you have a Trust-wide obesity and weight management strategy? If so, how is this implemented (for example, through delivery of Tier 3 obesity services of the NHS Tiered Care Weight Management Pathway)?
- Details of staff training to deliver these strategies,
- Details of any current training for clinical staff in the area of weight discrimination, weight stigma, weight bias and/or obesity awareness
- The number of complaints made to the Trust where weight discrimination, bias or stigma was mentioned in the period 1st January 2014 to 31st December 2023. If necessary, it would be sufficient to provide information from the date of the merger but preferred if information could be provided as far back as possible (with the 2014 limit).
- Any planned or current actions in response to the Health and Social Care Committee report on ‘The Impact of Body Image of Mental and Physical Health’.
I am collecting this information as part of a research project on current CPD training for healthcare professionals in the area of weight discrimination which I would be very happy to discuss further if that would be helpful.
Information disclosed:
Please note University Hospitals Sussex NHS Foundation Trust was formed on 1 April 2021, with the merger of Brighton and Sussex University Hospitals NHS Trust and Western Sussex Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust. Information about the Trust’s hospitals is available on our website.
1.The Trust does not currently have a specific Trust-wide obesity and weight management strategy. St. Richard’s Hospital, Chichester, offers a Bariatric/Tier 4 service, but no Tier 3 management.
University Hospitals Sussex NHS Foundation Trust is not commissioned to provide Tier 2/3/4 services in the Brighton and Hove/Mid Sussex region.
2. Not applicable
3. The Trust does not provide specific training in this area, but a number of staff have had British Dietetic Association (BDA) behaviour training to support their work, which is transferrable and provides guidance around difficult conversations relevant to a patient’s weight. In addition, staff receive training in line with the Trust’s policy of ‘Patient First’ which promotes compassion, communication, inclusion, and respect for all staff and patients.
Further information about the Patient First approach can be found on our website.
4. Unfortunately, ‘weight discrimination, bias or stigma’ is not a specified complaint category on our Patient Advice and Liaison Service (PALS) administration system, therefore complaints of this nature will not be easy for us to identify.
Any effort to compile this data for you will require the manual audit of all complaint ‘free text’ fields to look for key words that might be relevant to any form of weight discrimination and then each complaint will need to be read and reviewed to determine if it meets the specific criteria of your request.
The PALS service receives over 1,000 concerns each year, so each of these would require review. It is important to note in these circumstances that the legacy Trusts used different reporting systems and therefore data relevant to periods of time prior to the merger (i.e. back to 2014) would require separate research and validation, if this data hasn’t already been archived.
For these reasons we unable to provide the information you are seeking within the ‘appropriate limit’ as outlined in the Fees Regulations and section 12 provision [cost limit] of the FOIA is applicable at this time.
5. There are currently no planned actions specifically relevant to the Health and Social Care Committee report you refer to.