NHS 10-Year Plan response from Slimming World’s Managing Director, Lisa Salmon
Slimming World's Managing Director Lisa Salmon discusses the Government's 10-Year Plan for the NHS which sets out to tackle obesity rates.
We welcome an ambitious plan from the Government to take a fresh look at the NHS and the delivery of healthcare in the UK. We’re pleased to see a recognition of the need to tackle obesity to help people to live healthier, happier lives at the heart of the NHS 10-Year Plan and commend the Government’s ambition to address the current obesogenic environment.
The principle of a neighbourhood health service is particularly promising. It reflects the way we’ve been successfully delivering weight management support, with groups at the heart of communities, since 1969. With 13,000 groups in neighbourhoods across the UK, which are accessed by people from all walks of life, we’re already helping around 700,000 every week to lose weight and create healthy, lasting habits around food, activity and mindset. We’re well placed to support the Government with their ambitions to take obesity services closer to home.
We’ve been proud to partner with Government and the NHS since we pioneered weight management referral schemes (which allow health professionals to prescribe their patients with 12 weeks of Slimming World group support) 25 years ago. We’re also long-standing providers of the NHS Digital Weight Management Programme and delighted to have seen so many NHS patients successfully lose weight through the programme and make healthy habits that will last them a lifetime. We hope to be able to change more lives as this programme is expanded.
We want to remind the Government that weight loss injections are not a silver bullet. They don’t work for everyone, they come with unpleasant side-effects and without adequate wraparound support people taking the drugs will regain the weight they’ve lost once they stop taking them.
As anticipated, weight loss injections are an important part of the Government’s plans to ‘launch a moonshot to end the obesity epidemic’. There is no denying that these drugs are a huge breakthrough in the treatment of obesity, and an expansion to the access of these drugs has the potential to help many people. However, we want to remind the Government that they are not a silver bullet. They don’t work for everyone, they come with unpleasant side-effects and without adequate wraparound support people taking the drugs will regain the weight they’ve lost once they stop taking them.
While we know that a healthy weight can be achieved, and maintained for life, without taking any medication, our wraparound support – available in communities and via our digital service – based around healthy lifestyle changes to food, drink and physical activity, is open to all adults, including those who have chosen to take weight loss drugs. We have a growing number of people online and in our groups who’ve come to us after starting to use the drugs as they understand the importance of making healthy changes alongside them and appreciate our experience and expertise in this area.
We would urge the Government to recognise, in the detail of the rollout of its Plan, that weight loss drugs, alongside digital treatment and support, cannot be the only option. We know that when they’re losing weight, people want and benefit from in-person peer support delivered in their neighbourhoods. With more than 55 years’ experience of community-based weight management through behaviour change, Slimming World has a clear role to play in working alongside the Government and the NHS to develop weight-loss solutions for the future health of the nation – and we’re ready to do just that.