NHS weight loss services are failing to keep up with skyrocketing demand as referrals quadruple in some areas, an investigation has found.
Experts have suggested a combination of higher obesity rates and more people seeking weight-loss jabs is fuelling the demand, according to the British Medical Journal.
The investigation comes as leading doctors warned that patients are buying weight loss drugs, such as Ozempic and Wegovy, online without proper “wraparound” care.
NHS England medical director Stephen Powis raised the alarm during a national healthcare conference this month over reports of people misusing the drugs as a quick fix to get “beach body ready.”
Patients should be supported by specialist weight management services if prescribed weight-loss drugs such as Wegovy or Ozempic, guidance from the National Institute for Clinical Excellence states.
However, according to the BMJ, specialist services in seven out of 42 areas in England had to close to referrals because demand had exceeded the number of staff able to treat patients.
Nerys Astbury, associate professor of diet and obesity at the University of Oxford, described the availability of specialist weight management services as “unequal and very limited, or completely absent in some regions.”
She told The BMJ that even where services do exist, “they are over-subscribed, waiting lists have been capped, or budgetary limitations mean services are at risk of being decommissioned.”
Services in West Yorkshire, for example, were treating 1,323 patients when it closed to new referrals in July last year – compared to 250 referrals it had planned for.
David Buck, senior fellow at The King’s Fund, said the government has had a “mixed record in the past on supporting health and weight management services, including reducing funding.” He said a “more strategic response” to tackling obesity, including through specialist services, was now needed.
Medics at the BMA’s national annual meeting in Belfast heard that there has been a “boom” in surgical tourism, which is “leading to a rise in serious post-surgery complications and deaths”.
David Strain, a professor of cardiometabolic health, also warned that a rising number of people are travelling abroad for procedures including weight loss surgery and hair implants, but may not be getting care of the same standard that they would expect in the UK.
Prof Strain, chairman of the British Medical Association’s (BMA) Board of Science, said medics in the UK are increasingly seeing patients with complications from surgeries, including infections.
Asked about weight-loss drugs, he said: “One of the big worries about using these agents without a full wraparound service is that if you just give a drug that makes people lose weight, without the proper wrapround care that goes with it – talks about the changes in diet required and exercise that is absolutely required – then people will lose fat and muscle and other tissues and we end up with a condition called sarcopenic obesity, where basically the muscles are being lost at the same rate that the fat is being lost, and you see that so-called ‘Wegovy face’, which is very gaunt.”
