THE NHS in Scotland is "fighting a losing battle" against childhood obesity after a new study revealed that three-quarters of health staff do not know how to diagnose or treat it.
The Glasgow University study has revealed "alarming gaps" in doctors', nurses', social workers' and teachers' knowledge of Scotland's national guidelines on childhood obesity.
Researchers found that 72.5% of staff who deal with overweight children and their families did not know the obesity guidelines and only 35% would be able to identify an obese child.
Margaret Watt, chairwoman of Scotland Patients Association, said: "If this many health staff can't even recognise obesity and don't know the national guidelines, we are fighting a losing battle."
The study suggests there is a lack of confidence and poor skills among staff tasked with tackling soaring rates of obesity in Scotland's children. Scotland has one of the highest levels of childhood obesity in the Western world, with 22% of six-year-olds overweight and 9% clinically obese.
The study was carried out by child health expert Shaza Aboof in NHS Tayside and NHS Shetland.
After a specialised training course was implemented, knowledge of obesity guidelines among staff more than tripled from 27.5% to 82%. Ms Aboof said: "It is hoped the training package could be adopted by other health boards."
A Scottish Government spokesman said: "We are working across all areas of Government to tackle overweight and obesity issues and support people to maintain a healthy weight."
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereComments are closed on this article