Quality standard

Quality statement 7: Evaluating lifestyle weight management programmes

Quality statement 7: Evaluating lifestyle weight management programmes

Quality statement

Children and young people, and their parents or carers, can access data on attendance, outcomes and the views of participants and staff from lifestyle weight management programmes.

Rationale

It's important that providers of lifestyle weight management programmes for children and young people measure outcomes of the programmes and make the results available. This will allow commissioners and the general public to monitor and evaluate particular programmes to assess whether they are meeting their objectives and providing value for money. This ensures that any issues with the programmes are identified as early as possible, so that the programmes can be improved, leading to better outcomes for children and young people using the programmes. It will also help children and young people, and their parents or carers, to select lifestyle weight management programmes.

Quality measures

Structure

a) Evidence that commissioners and providers of lifestyle weight management programmes for children and young people jointly agree the key performance indicators to be collected for monitoring and evaluation.

Data source: Local data collection.

b) Evidence that commissioners and providers of lifestyle weight management programmes for children and young people have used data from monitoring and evaluation to amend and improve programmes.

Data source: Local data collection.

Process

a) Proportion of children and young people recruited to a lifestyle weight management programme that has data on attendance, outcomes and the views of participants and staff collected at recruitment and completion.

Numerator – the number in the denominator that has data on attendance, outcomes and the views of participants and staff collected at recruitment and completion.

Denominator – the number of children and young people recruited to a lifestyle weight management programme.

Data source: Local data collection.

b) Proportion of children and young people who complete a lifestyle weight management programme that has data on outcomes collected at 6 months after completion of the programme.

Numerator – the number in the denominator that has data on outcomes collected at 6 months after completion of the programme.

Denominator – the number of children and young people who complete a lifestyle weight management programme.

Data source: Local data collection.

c) Proportion of children and young people who complete a lifestyle weight management programme that has data on outcomes collected at 1 year after completion of the programme.

Numerator – the number in the denominator that has data on outcomes collected at 1 year after completion of the programme.

Denominator – the number of children and young people who complete a lifestyle weight management programme.

Data source: Local data collection.

What the quality statement means for different audiences

Providers of lifestyle weight management programmes for children and young people ensure that they collect and report data to monitor and evaluate the programme.

Commissioners (including directors of public health, public health teams, local authority commissioners and clinical commissioning groups) ensure that sufficient resources are dedicated to monitoring and evaluation, that they evaluate lifestyle weight management programmes for children and young people using data on outcomes, and use the data to amend and improve the programme.

Children and young people (and their parents or carers) attend lifestyle weight management programmes that are regularly monitored and evaluated so that the programmes can be improved.

Definitions of terms used in this quality statement

Data on attendance, outcomes and the views of participants and staff

The data to be collected include:

  • Numbers recruited, percentage completing the programme and percentage followed up at 6 months and at 1 year after completing the programme.

  • For all those recruited, BMI and BMI z score measured at:

    • recruitment

    • completion of the programme

    • 6 months after completing the programme

    • 1 year after completing the programme.

  • referral routes

  • outcomes related to the aim of the programme and related to factors that can support or contribute to a reduction in BMI, for example:

    • improvements in diet

    • improvements in physical activity

    • reduction in sedentary behaviour

    • improvements in self‑esteem.

  • variations in outcomes, according to age, gender, ethnicity and socioeconomic status

  • views of participants (including children, young people and their families and/or carers who have participated in the programme, as well as those who did not complete the programme)

  • views of staff delivering the programme. [Adapted from NICE's guideline on weight management, recommendations 2 and 15]

(See Public Health England's Standard evaluation framework for weight management interventions for examples of other possible outcome measures.)

Lifestyle weight management programme

Lifestyle weight management programmes focus on diet, physical activity and behaviour change to help people who are overweight or obese. They are usually based in the community and may be run by the public, private or voluntary sector. [Adapted from NICE's guideline on weight management]

Equality and diversity considerations

When monitoring and evaluating lifestyle weight management programmes, information also needs to be captured to ensure that the programmes are suitable for minority groups, for example, by family origin, religion and disability, and that reasonable adaptations are being made to the programmes to make them accessible to these groups and to assess their impact on health inequalities.