Grant: Partnerships for Health System Improvement (PHSI)

Extreme obesity is present in 9% of the Canadian population. Extremely obese people have a high chance of developing health problems and dying early. Our national guidelines recommend that extremely obese individuals receive multidisciplinary treatment, meaning that a number of specialized care providers should be available to help administer obesity treatments to these patients. However, this type of treatment is scarce in Canada and wait times average 5 years. We oversee a large regional obesity program called the Edmonton Weight Wise Obesity Program. Our team is composed of clinicians and decision makers that have worked together to grow and improve Weight Wise over the last 8 years. In fact, we are now in charge of expanding Weight Wise to the the rest of Alberta. Weight Wise now has a wait list of 2 years and 2000 people are waiting for treatment. We performed a survey of the patients on the wait list and discovered that they self-report extremely poor health and feel that the long wait times are partly responsible for this poor health. To try to support these patients as they wait for multidisciplinary care, we designed a group based self-management intervention, consisting of Weight Wise Community Modules. Patients attend this program over six months to receive weight management education (diet, exercise, stress management, coping strategies). We propose to determine if these modules actually help to reduce weight and improve quality of life in the wait listed patients. We also wish to examine whether or not these modules are cost effective. The community modules are useful, we will expand their use to the rest of Alberta and we suspect that other provinces will wish to implement a similar program. If these modules are not useful, we will need to find a more effective way to support wait listed patients.