Assessment Of Unhealthy Weight In Children

01 March 2010

The NOF view is that all UK children should be weighed and measured annually from age one year to catch the majority of the 27%  who enter primary school either overweight or obese.  This would go a long way to ensuring that a recommendation made by the Chief Medical Officer for England in 2003 was met.  Sir Liam Donaldson directed that health professionals - including general practitioners, school nurses, practice nurses and health visitors - should identify early signs of obesity in children and offer interventions at an early stage. Provisions have been made in the Health & Social Act [2008] for pre-school and school age children to be measured and this should have been implemented by now.

The UK's Royal College of Paediatrics & Child Health and NOF jointly stated [2002] that all children with severe and progressive obesity should be referred to a paediatrician before age 2 and, in 2004, the Health Select Committee of the House of Commons recommended that all school age children should be measured annually and their BMI calculated.   Until this is done it is the NOF's view that capping childhood obesity in the UK will be harder and take longer to accomplish and that the implementation of QOF payments could ensure that the assessments were carried out