What do the Complications of Excess Weight services actually look like?
This is a question that we have been asking ourselves too. When we started the ENHANCE, there were 21 (Complications of Excess Weight (CEW) services across England, now there are over 40 of them. This is brilliant as it means there is more support available for young people and their families. It also means that it is really important to know what is going on within all these clinics. Do they all look the same? How do they work? Which members of a clinical team are involved? How do families access them? How long do they provide support for? These are all questions that we wanted answers to (and lots more besides that)!
So, within the ENHANCE project, we have a dedicated work-package which explores the design and delivery of the CEW services. We are using a tool called STAR-LITE to help us with this, which we have adapted specifically for ENHANCE. The adapted STAR-LITE is a 52-item questionnaire that we have asked 30 CEW services to complete. They have been able to do this either on their own or by having a conversation with one of our lovely researchers.
The questionnaire has five main sections to it. We ask questions about:
How the CEW service was designed
How young people and families can get referred to the service and what the referral criteria are
How many young people the service can see and whether it has a waiting list
What the CEW service looks like and who is involved in delivering it
What happens when young people finish the CEW service
There are some big advantages to using a questionnaire like this. It means that we ask the same questions to all CEW services in the same way. We can then gather all the responses and compare CEW services to each other, in terms of what they look like and how they work. By doing this, we can find CEW services that have been designed in similar or different ways.
We will then be able to combine the results of the STAR-LITE questionnaire with other work-packages in our ENHANCE project. For example, we can see whether some types of service (for example, those which have a group-based element to them) lead to better improvements in health and wellbeing of young people, or whether certain types of service cost more than others.
As well as the STAR-LITE questionnaire, we have also spoken with 10 national policymakers to understand their expectations for the CEW programme, and we are planning to visit several CEW services to observe them in practice.
Keep checking back on this website for updates on the STAR-LITE questionnaire and this work-package.
Dr James Nobles and the Work Package 2 Team