HPHWD

The report from the Royal College of Physicians (RCP) finds that too little is being done for adults who are severely overweight. NHS services are “extremely patchy”, it says, even though a quarter of all adults are obese and it is estimated that by 2050 most of the population will be.

Professor John Wass, chair of the working party that produced the report, says there is a real need for leadership. The report calls for a senior figure in government who will take charge of obesity issues across all departments – from education to health, to agriculture and work and pensions.

Wass says we could learn from the US, where Michael Bloomberg, mayor of New York, and Michelle Obama in the White House have been leading a successful fight against obesity. He said: “I think we could have a senior figure in London, rather like the mayor of New York, who has led on having smaller measures of Coca-Cola in cups and other things. Michelle Obama has had a huge effect on obesity and getting things labelled.

Professor Wilkinson agreed that the move grated with the book’s egalitarian ethos, but said it reflected the authors’ “near-total exhaustion” due to all the demands on their time, such as answering a “deluge” of emails, writing articles and giving lectures all over the world, as well as keeping up their ongoing research.

There is ongoing discussion about how the government’s planned reorganisation will affect the NHS and therefore health inequalities. But how effective has the NHS been at reducing health inequalities in recent years? Joan Costa-Font, Cristina Hernández-Quevedo, and Alistair McGuire of LSE Health have found that while health inequalities have decreased in the past decade, often costly interventions in specific areas appear to have had little effect.