The Health Secretary, Wes Streeting has announced a new £279m package which includes a study by Health Innovation Manchester and the pharma giant Lilly to examine the effect on the workforce if more people were given weight loss jabs like Ozempic or Wegovy.
It is a bold plan and certainly a good idea to attack the issue of obesity which causes more deaths every year than smoking and costs the NHS over £1.1billion in associated treatments.
Obesity can cause multi- organ issues and the associated lack of mobility can lead to many conditions accelerating as a result of the lack of exercise or healthy routines. Consequently, much needed operations can be delayed due to the increased risk caused whilst under anaesthesia and this can then have a knock on effect on treatment.
However, does it need so much money spent on a study to prove that if people can lose weight and improve their general health then they would return to work? Also, are we only going to provide the weight loss jabs as a priority to those people who would be capable of returning to the workforce rather than those with the most urgent health need? Treatment generally on the NHS is already a postcode lottery with the availability of resources being unequal across the country.
Wegovy was made available as a prescription drug on the NHS in December last year and the NICE guidelines were for weight loss clinics to prescribe to people with a Body mass index of 35 or above and at least one related condition and they had identified 13,500 as eligible at the start of the year. By April, only 800 had been prescribed and many clinics had restricted access further to only those who needed to lose weight for life threatening situations such as cancer surgery or organ transplants rather than knee replacements.
Ozempic was developed as a drug to treat diabetes and has recently been approved as being available for heart failure but due to it becoming known as a “weight loss jab” , it led to depleted supply issues over the summer for many pharmacies in the UK and the emergence of alternatives becoming commonly advertised as being available. However, is it appropriate for everyone to take if they are not diabetic already? Our PI Solicitor, Richard Bate, examines this in a separate article.
The recent announcement would have been better served using the £279m into consideration of the best deployment of resources to spread the benefit of the “weight loss” jabs across the most urgent health need which will be related to those with obesity related diabetes and cardiac issues.
