Obesity: unrecognised or avoided? We are missing opportunities to ‘make every contact count’

Obesity, ‘one of the biggest public health threats facing the UK’, is highlighted by the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health as one of seven key priorities for children’s health and well-being.1 The statistics are shocking: One-third of children aged 10–11 years and one-fifth of children aged 4–5 years in England are overweight or obese.1 In 2017, the Obesity Health Alliance’s position statement on tackling obesity in the UK called for further action over and above the Government’s 2016 Childhood Obesity Plan.2 We would like to draw your readers’ attention to the role of health professionals in making ‘every contact count’1 2 and to highlight our concerns about current practice, based on a recent clinical audit. At our trust, all medical outpatients have height and weight measured at each clinic attendance, with body mass index (BMI) automatically plotted on centile charts within their electronic record. We retrospectively reviewed records of a random sample of 100 new medical …