Equweighty: Weight Discrimination Training for Health Equity

Context: Weight discrimination (hereafter WD) is endemic in healthcare. Of the 43.2m ‘obese’/‘overweight’ UK adults, 74% report discrimination by practitioners. WD takes the form of overtly stigmatising language, an over-emphasis on weight at the expense of other health issues, the unavailability of adequately sized equipment, and more. WD leads to disordered eating, trauma, depression, healthcare avoidance and their knock-on costs. It compounds and deepens existing health inequalities. The Challenge: Several professional and policy bodies have drawn attention to the need for better training provision for healthcare practitioners to recognise and address unintentional discriminatory behaviours. Yet such training is severely lacking - our market validation demonstrated that only 2.3% of hospitals in England offer their staff specific WD training and 0% of GP surgeries that we surveyed offered their staff any form of WD training. Aim: In response, we propose founding a specialist, profit-generating training organisation - Equweighty - offering bespoke, flexible CPD-accredited training in WD marketed to UK healthcare practitioners. We aim to offer a 'menu' of training formats that can be tailored to specific customer group needs. Our venture will help address the problem of WD in healthcare and its consequent treatment inequity by providing support for more inclusive, person-centred, equitable care benefiting practitioners and patients with better health outcomes. Objectives: We have undertaken market validation which has identified a need for our venture, and we have verified a willingness for customers to pay for our training through a pilot workshop with occupational therapists. Our objectives for ARC Accelerate participation are to (i) develop a business model, (ii) develop a marketing and visibility strategy, and (iii) acquire the skills to pitch for investment. Working with ARC experts on these objectives will help us move towards our next milestones of incorporation and scale-up. Applications and Benefits: After incorporation, our primary application, customer base and beneficiaries are related to the healthcare field. Our initial target customers are the 1.5m NHS employees with annual CPD training budgets of £330-£5K, and practitioner group education leads who commission CPD courses in response to strategic priorities. WD is climbing the policy and practice agenda and increasingly being identified as a priority training area in healthcare. Practitioners who participate in our WD training will benefit from strategies to develop more inclusive practice, their patients will experience more supportive healthcare interactions which empower them as joint decision-makers, and the NHS will benefit from increased patient satisfaction, engagement and cost reduction. We also have stretch goals to expand into secondary markets including marketing our training to the 600K non-clinical NHS staff who require annual EDI training; practitioners in private healthcare organisations; and other sectors where WD occurs – e.g. the travel, hospitality, leisure and retail industries. Measure of Success: Research with student practitioners shows training increases awareness of, and reduces, WD. Active and tailored training involving reflection, empathy, role-specific considerations and patient experiences shows reduced WD and improved weight neutrality in 50-82% of learners. Our own research on Health At Every Size demonstrates weight-neutral practitioners engender better patient engagement, and our pilot workshop demonstrated behaviour change. Others have shown that non-discriminatory, weight-neutral healthcare practice can improve clinical measures like reducing blood pressure and improving mental well-being. Success for Equweighty is an incorporated WD training organisation providing reliable revenue and making a measurable impact on healthcare practice.