Do You Have Weight Bias?

While I am enjoying a few days away from the office, I will be reposting some of the most popular past postings new readers may have missed.

Rudd Centre for Food Policy & Obesity

Readers of these pages are well aware of my concern about weight bias and discrimination. This is not only a problem with the general public, but also explains much of the negative attitudes of health professionals, administrators and policy makers towards addressing the real plight of individuals with obesity – no one appears to be immune.

Unfortunately, weight bias jeopardizes patients’ emotional and physical health – it is therefore important for all health professionals (and any one else, who is interested) to determine and become fully aware of their own level of weight bias.

To address this issue, the Rudd Center for Food Policy & Obesity (Yale University, New Haven) has now released a toolkit, which is specifically designed to help clinicians across a variety of practice settings to test their own weight bias and which provides easy-to-implement solutions and resources to improve delivery of care for overweight and obese patients.

The resources are designed for busy professionals and customized for various practice settings. They range from simple strategies to improve provider-patient communication and ways to make positive changes in the office environment, to profound ones, including self-examination of personal biases.

The resource kit, consists of the following 8 modules:

MODULE 1: Increasing Self-Awareness of Weight Bias

MODULE 2: Improving Provider-Patient Interactions

MODULE 3: Overview of Weight Bias in Health Care Settings

MODULE 4: Office Environment Strategies to Reduce Weight Bias

MODULE 5: Weight Bias Resources for OBGYN Providers

MODULE 6: Weight Bias Resources for Pediatricians

MODULE 7: Weight Bias Resources for Bariatric Surgery Clinics

MODULE 8: Resources for Overweight Patients

I hope that all health professionals and individuals concerned about the discimination of overweight and obesity will explore these modules and help spread the word.

AMS
Ucluelet, BC