The growing cost of obesity

Recent studies have shown that obesity really is a growing problem for the NHS. It has been shown to have catastrophic effects on people’s health and suggests that it is likely to have the same effect on the health service’s bank balance, reportsRichard Mackillican

The latest statistics show that around a quarter of Britain’s population is now obese and this is only set to rise in the future, despite various government programmes to encourage people to eat more healthily.

Because so much of the population is now classed as obese, the NHS has had to begin to procure specialist equipment with which to deal with obese patients, including weight loss remedies, extra large surgical equipment and specialist ambulances fitted with winches.

“The latest figures show that the total cost of obesity to the NHS every year is around £2 billion. This is a very high figure and is continuing to escalate,” says Tam Fry of the National Obesity Forum.

“Of that two billion, the NHS spends around £40 million ever year just on refitting ambulances so that they are able to deal with obese patients, which is not an inconsiderable amount of money in itself.”

This is a problem which is continuing to grow in size and so are the costs to the NHS in terms of specialist equipment, products and services.

This continuing rise in the cost of obesity to the NHS has been reflected in the rise in the percentage of trust budgets which are allocated to tackle the problem. For example, in 2007/08, Halton and St Helens PCT spent £800,000 tackling obesity. Two years later this had more than tripled to £3 million.

Despite this rise in spending on obesity, Tam believes that the government is keen to gloss over the true scale of the problem.

“The Department of Health is keen to say that obesity figures are levelling off, which is true in regards to the higher socio-economic groups who have more disposable income with which to buy better quality food, along with a higher standard of education which enables them to understand the various messages being put across to them about healthy eating and also the labelling on the food.

“Despite this small improvement in the middle and upper classes, we expect to see obesity increasing in lower income families and although there may be a levelling off of those who are becoming obese who were originally a normal weight, we are seeing those who are already obese becoming even larger.”

Dealing with an obese population which is growing larger both in number and physical size is going to be one of the major challenges for the NHS to deal with.

Apart from procuring specialist equipment, the NHS is now carrying out more obesity related operations than ever before which means that it is also having to procure even more specialist equipment to deal with obese patients.

“Something like 700,000 people qualify for bariatric surgery, which, although it is already a huge figure, is still growing. In fact many bariatric surgeons consider this to be a growth area. This means that the outlook for the next twenty years is not particularly rosy.

“There is also a fear that if the drug therapy on which everyone has been placing such hopes, begins to become impossible because the drugs are being removed from the prescription list; at least two out of the three have already been removed and there is a fear that even Orlistat will go at some stage in the future. If this happens, then the dependency on bariatric surgery will be even intense.”

Another problem which the NHS is experiencing, according to Tam, is that a lot of people are now seeing surgery as being a better choice than drug treatment.

“This is because the results of surgery are so immediate. Once a person is fitted with a gastric band, within days or weeks they will be considerably reduced in size, whereas with drugs it can take months for patients to get even a few percentage points below their pre-treatment levels and can still leave them obese. This means that the future is looking rather good for bariatric surgeons, but not so for the NHS as whole.

“If this problem is going to be tackled effectively, then the NHS needs to begin attacking the root cause of obesity which is bad eating habits from an early age. Our evidence suggests this counts from the very first year after birth.”

So if the NHS wishes to halt its seemingly ever increasing bill for obesity, it needs to target the young and quick.