Issue details

Weight management continues to be a priority for Doncaster as the obesity statistics for Doncaster remains unchanged and could potentially grow further. The impact of increasing obesity levels (and associated long term conditions). on health and social care services would be increased without low level prevention and upstream approaches, and the longer term impact on our increasing ageing population would need to be factored in to the future planning of services and budgets.

The Fit Rovers health and wellbeing programme will compliment the current healthy weight portfolio and provides a frontline initiative for males and females around weight reduction and behaviour change approaches in the absence of a Tier 2 weight management service.

The current service has received some short term funding from the Doncaster Clinical Commissioning group and previously a small grant from the Sport England fund however those funds are now depleting although some CCG funding will continue to support the marketing and wider health benefits of the service and compliment the DMBC grant as it will not meet the full service costs. The DMBC grant will support delivery costs only for part year 2019/20 and the funding for 2020/21 onwards will need further consideration in line with finance planning going forwards in 2020/21 but there are no formal commitments for this at this stage.

There is currently no alternative weight management service in Doncaster other than the Tier 3 weight management service which is a pre-bariatric service for the morbidly obese and therefore the Fit Rovers service currently fills a gap in the lower level prevention (tier 2) weight management services approach.

Current data from the programme demonstrates good uptake, retention and outcomes from males and females and the large waiting list (over 200) indicates the need and demand for such a service in Doncaster.

For the reasons above there is currently no alternative service available and if rejected the programme would inevitably have to close and leave unmet need and add to a growing obesity epidemic and further burden on health and social care services.

The Director of Public Health has already had conversations with our Procurement team and finance to ensure that this meets our corporate policy guidelines around grant agreements. The grant agreement will be facilitated through our legal department following sign off the ODR and conversations have already commenced with that department.