Grant: Catalyst Gr: Disease Prev./Risk Factor Modification - Non-communicable diseases

Obesity is a critical international non-communicable chronic disease which has many bad effects on individuals. For people with morbid obesity, a surgery which reduces the size of their stomach (bariatric surgery) can help people reduce their weight. Unfortunately, for a number of patients surgery alone doesn't work and it seems that helping people change their health behaviours (for example, their exercise and eating behaviours, and how they deal with stress) is important. However, the majority of the time these patients can't access health behaviour change programs in their communities and in the healthcare system because they are not created for their specific needs. Our project will work with people who are important in bariatric surgery (patients, healthcare professionals, health administrators, and researchers) to identify what kinds of behaviour change interventions could be developed and delivered to help patients achieve better health. To do this we will: -Send a survey, which was developed by our patient-investigators, to bariatric patients before and after their surgery to see what people want and what would help them do such programs -Using a well recognised methodology, an eDelphi process, we would contact a variety of people with a wide range of experience and expertise to identify the programs and their structure which are most likely to be successful -Conduct a meeting with all the key people in the process to workout how we will actually take the information we collected and put it into practise. This project will provide us with a series of health behaviour change programs that patients think are helpful and they would be willing to do, researchers have shown work, and healthcare professions think can be put into practice around bariatric surgery. Ultimately, these programs should help a group of people who currently don't have access to these kinds of important programs and whose health would really benefit from participating in them.