The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) has begun a consultation on draft guidance on the services available to help children and young people to achieve and maintain a healthy weight.

These “lifestyle weight management services” may work with groups of families or individual families and their focus will be on a lifestyle approach to helping overweight or obese children and young people achieve and maintain a healthy weight. This will include diet and eating habits, physical activity, reducing the amount of time spent being sedentary and strategies for changing the behaviour of the child or young person and their close family.

Professor Mike Kelly, Director of the Centre for Public Health Excellence at NICE said: “Obese children and young people are at risk of developing asthma or sleep-disordered breathing, including sleep apnoea. It has also become increasingly common for them to develop type 2 diabetes. At the moment around three in ten children aged two to 15 years old are either overweight or obese[1] and obese teenagers are likely to grow up to be obese adults when they will be at risk from serious health conditions including type 2 diabetes, coronary heart disease and cancers.

“Being overweight or obese can also have a significant impact on a child's quality of life. It affects their self-esteem and they are more likely to be bullied or stigmatised”.

Prof Kelly continued: “The draft guidance makes a number of recommendations to ensure that the providers of programmes whether from the private, public, or voluntary sector follow good, evidence-based practice. Recommendations include tailoring programmes to meet the individual needs of each child or young person and ensuring parents or carers and other family members are involved.

“This draft guidance isn't about quick fixes, it is about making changes to behaviours within a family, which they can sustain in the longer term, to help children and young people to achieve and maintain a healthy weight.”

NICE has already published a number of pieces of guidance on the prevention and management of obesity, but this is the first guidance on the provision of lifestyle weight management services specifically for children and young people.

This guidance does not provide detail on preventing obesity or pharmacological or surgical treatments for obesity. It is aimed at commissioners, local authority managers, directors of public health and their teams, those providing weight management services to children and young people, health professionals and people working with children and young people.

Draft recommendations include:

• Planning lifestyle weight management services for children and young people: Ensure family-based, multi-component lifestyle weight management services for children and young people are available as part of a community-wide, multi-agency approach to promoting a healthy weight and preventing and managing obesity.
• Commissioning lifestyle weight management programmes for children and young people: Ensure programmes have been designed and developed with input from a multi-disciplinary team that specialises in children and young people and can provide expertise for each component of the programme. For example: a state registered dietitian or registered nutritionist, a physical activity specialist, a behaviour-change expert such as a health psychologist, health promotion specialist or exercise psychologist, with input from a child psychologist.
• Developing a tailored programme plan to meet individual needs:
  • Identify situations where it would be possible to eat more healthily, or to become less sedentary and more active.
  • Set small realistic goals which are mutually agreed with the child or young person and their family.
  • Regularly monitor progress against the goals and provide feedback to the child or young person and their parents or carers.
  • Stress the importance of maintaining changes, no matter how small, over the longer term
  • Explore the family's history of attempts to manage their weight, and their attitudes towards food, physical activity and the amount of time spent being sedentary.
• Lifestyle weight management programmes: core components: Ensure the following core components are included:
  • Behaviour-change techniques to increase motivation and confidence in the ability to change. This includes strategies to help the family identify how changes can be implemented and sustained at home.
  • An emphasis on the importance of encouraging all family members to eat healthily and to be physically active, regardless of their weight.
  • Educational information and help to develop and master skills such as how to interpret nutritional labelling and how to modify culturally appropriate recipes.
  • A range of physical activities which are inclusive (such as games, dancing and aerobics) which the children or young people enjoy, and which can help them become increasingly more active.
• Providing ongoing support: health professionals: Offer all participants ongoing support when they have completed the programme.

The draft guidance will be available on the NICE website from 19 April 2013. NICE is also developing guidance on lifestyle weight management services for overweight and obese adults.

Ends

Notes to Editors

About the guidance

1. The draft guidance will be available from 19 April 2013. Embargoed copies of the draft guidance are available from the NICE press office on request.

About NICE

The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) is the independent body responsible for driving improvement and excellence in the health and social care system. We develop guidance, standards and information on high-quality health and social care. We also advise on ways to promote healthy living and prevent ill health.

Formerly the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence, our name changed on 1 April 2013 to reflect our new and additional responsibility to develop guidance and set quality standards for social care, as outlined in the Health and Social Care Act (2012).

Our aim is to help practitioners deliver the best possible care and give people the most effective treatments, which are based on the most up-to-date evidence and provide value for money, in order to reduce inequalities and variation.

Our products and resources are produced for the NHS, local authorities, care providers, charities, and anyone who has a responsibility for commissioning or providing healthcare, public health or social care services.

To find out more about what we do, visit our website: www.nice.org.uk and follow us on Twitter: @NICEComms.

[1] NHS Information Centre 2013