Needing Care

The Urgent Need for Action on Weight Bias in Healthcare

At the very outset of this week’ s International Weight Bias Summit in Montreal, one thing was plain see. Weight bias in healthcare is an area to focus on for much needed action. How can we accept this? People seeking care for obesity and health conditions that may (or may not) be related to it face stigma in this setting. They should instead be finding care and help.

As we finished a day of discussing everyone’s work and priorities for the future, Professor Rebecca Puhl told us the problem has been obvious for some time. We need action to reduce the bias that people living with obesity encounter in healthcare:

“We have so much work to do to reduce weight stigma from health professionals. And it needs to start much much earlier in the training process.”

A Particular Problem in Some Specialties

Sean Phelan is one of the participants in this summit. He and colleagues recently published a study of explicit weight bias in 16 of the most common medical residency programs in the U.S. It appeared in the Journal of General Internal Medicine.

They found problematic levels of explicit bias in all specialties. For example, almost 40% of residents were quite ready to blame patients for their condition, agreeing that “fat people tend to be fat pretty much through their own fault.”

But the problem was especially acute in certain specialities. For example, residents in obstetrics and gynecology, anesthesiology, and orthopedic surgery expressed the greatest dislike for working with higher weight individuals. Phelan and colleagues concluded:

“There is a need for intervention to reduce weight bias across residency types, with the highest need in the specialty residencies. Given the high prevalence of anti-fat attitudes in medical students and beyond, our findings highlight the importance of intervening early and often in medical training to reduce bias and improve the quality of care for higher-weight patients.”

Can We Just Stop?

The question is obvious. Can we please just stop training healthcare providers who will harm patients with explicit weight bias? Everyone deserves respectful, compassionate care. Healthcare absent actual care is nothing but billable health services. It’s not really healthcare.

Click here for Phelan’s recent paper and here for more on the summit and today’s free webinar. For more on the barriers to healthcare that bias can create, click here.

Needing Care, photograph from the Stop Weight Bias Image Gallery / Obesity Action Coalition

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October 25, 2024

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