What are we doing?
We are aiming to find out how people who experience depression, anxiety or other common mental illnesses access and use publicly-funded weight management services on offer at GP surgeries and other community settings. We are especially interested in how people find out about these services, whether they are helpful, and how they can be improved.
Why is this important?
Around two thirds of UK adults are overweight, which can affect both physical and mental well-being. It is not unusual for people to experience depression and overweight/obesity at the same time, and people have described how vicious cycles of weight re-gain and ongoing mental ill-health can create barriers to change.
Although community-based weight management services are important in helping people maintain healthier lifestyles, it is unknown how people living with depression and other common mental health conditions experience accessing and using these services.
How will we do it?
We will conduct interviews with health professionals and people living with overweight/obesity and depression or similar mental health conditions. We will talk to people who have used community-based weight management services and people who have not. We want to understand more about how and why people choose to use these services and how they are experienced in practice. We also intend to observe weight management sessions to understand more about how services can be improved.
We will use well-tested methods to draw out the main points from people’s experiences and make recommendations for improving services. These ideas will be discussed in meetings with public representatives and other health professionals before we set out a final plan for service improvement.
Working with service users
The lived experience is key to any conversation on overweight/ obesity and PPI (Patient and Public Involvement) is at the heart of this research project. We have included a PPI partner from the outset, who is part of the study management team and will work with us to recruit and lead a specific PPI study team.
The PPI team will be asked to help with key parts of the research, such as planning who to invite for research interviews, deciding what questions will be asked, and deciding how best to inform the public about research findings.
What will we produce from this research?
The output of the project will be a plan to develop weight management services for people living with depression and other common mental health conditions. This will be written in an easy-to-read format and will be shared with those responsible for designing and providing services, and members of the public who need to know what services are available and how best to access them.