MEND's Manifesto

MEND believes in a world where everyone lives fitter, healthier and happier lives. In order to achieve this, we are calling for:

Access to evidence-based weight management services for everyone who needs them

First and foremost, we would like to see immediate action taken nationally and locally to ensure that local service provision is not effected during the transition from PCTs to local authorities commissioning for public health. Over the past year MEND has seen a substantial decrease in the number of PCT contracts for children weight management programmes, despite ever increasing need. It is vital that commissioners, especially those who are not specialists in child and adult weight management and obesity prevention, are supported during the transition in making rational decisions about which interventions to purchase and how to do so in a timely manner.

Going forward, we would also like to see support for evidence-based, scalable solutions which can be rolled out cost effectively. We call upon local authorities and Health and Wellbeing Boards to consider regional or pan-City commissioning of weight management services, and upon central government and Public Health England to encourage this and facilitate the sharing of best practice.

Commissioning without the bureaucracy

New commissioners will need support in commissioning effective child weight management services within the new public health system. Specifically MEND would like to see a commissioning support pack developed for obesity services. The pack should be built on existing good practice and include high quality obesity pathways; benchmarking data to assess relative need of populations and performance of providers; suggested proxy outcome measures to enable performance managing of providers; and cost data to set out what a reasonable cost is and when scalable solutions are most cost effective in the absence of a national tariff. The continuation of the National Child Measurement Programme will be crucial to this. Quality commissioning can also be ensured by the compulsory use by providers and commissioners of a national set of evidence, the development of a clear set of standards by which to evaluate providers, and a directory of providers.

National, local and private sector leadership

While MEND agrees that giving local authority responsibility for commissioning for public health makes sense, central government still has a role to play in encouraging best practice and providing a clear vision through an obesity strategy. We welcomed the publication of A call to action on obesity in England, but call on the government to publish additional detail on how the overarching ambitions will be met. We also encourage the government to fulfil its intention to rebalance the budget between prevention and treatment to reflect the greater evidence for treatment.

Meanwhile, local governments should work together through health and wellbeing boards, and regional organisation to reduce health inequalities and agree on joint-commissioning strategies.

Finally, the private sector should be encouraged to make a contribution to public health by investing and by changing their own behaviour. MEND is a signatory of the public health responsibility deal, and would like to see more businesses coming forward with individual pledges and projects, as have many of the corporates we currently work with.