National Obesity Audit

Programme overview

Nearly two-thirds of adults in England are living with overweight or obesity. A third of children leaving primary school are living with overweight or obesity.

Obesity is a serious health concern that increases the risk of many other health conditions, including Type 2 Diabetes, cardiovascular disease, joint problems, mental health problems, and some cancers.

NHS England and Improvement have established the National Obesity Audit (NOA) as part of the National Clinical Audit and Patient Outcomes Programme.

The NOA is delivered by NHS Digital. NOA will bring together comparable data from the different types of adult and children’s weight management services across England in order to drive improvement for the benefit of those living with overweight and obesity.

Objectives of the audit

The NOA seeks to answer seven important questions:

1. What proportion of people and which population groups living with overweight and obesity are being identified and recorded?
2. What proportion of people living with overweight and obesity have been offered appropriate NICE recommended interventions?
3. Which people living with overweight and obesity access weight management services?
4. What are the short and long term weight loss outcomes of weight management services?
5. Do people living with overweight and obesity transition successfully between the different types of weight management services available and from children’s to adult services?
6. What are the health outcomes for people living with overweight and obesity?
7. What is the coverage and provision of weight management services?

In so doing the audit aims to:

• Increase the number of people living with overweight and obesity referred to and accessing weight management services
• Improve equity of access to and engagement with weight management services
• Improve outcomes from weight management services
• Improve the transition of care from paediatric to adult services.

Services and commissioners will be able to use the NOA data to deliver equitable access to effective prevention and care programmes.

Additional information on all HQIP-commissioned projects is available on the NHS Trusts page, which includes the recommendations repository, infographics compendium, 9 month publication schedule, impact report, and National Clinical Audit and Enquiries Directory.

For further information about this project, please contact the project team directly using the contact details listed in the ‘Supplier Info’ section above.

Publications

The latest publication to be released for the National Obesity Audit is now available and can be accessed here.

This is the third release of data to form part of the National Obesity Audit. Data on NHS funded bariatric surgical procedures delivered in England, are presented in an interactive dashboard. All data is currently sourced from Hospital Episode Statistics (HES), NHS England.

This third release includes updates to the quarterly time series for patients who had a primary bariatric surgical procedure in Q1 or Q2 in 2022/23. It also includes data presented at sub-integrated care board level, previously reported as clinical commissioning groups (CCGs). All previously published annual data for 2017/18 to 2021/22 is also available.

Engaging with people and communities

To find out more, please click here.

Accessing data

Data collected on behalf of HQIP by all NCAPOP projects is routinely reported and these reports are available in the ‘Latest resources’ section. The reported data is also placed on the data.gov.uk website.

For regularly updated dynamic reporting of audit data, follow the link in the HQIP Directory in the column called ‘Link to dynamic reporting’.

For details of how to apply for data that is not in the public domain for this project, please use the contact details listed in the ‘Supplier Info’ section above.

Details of the contracts that HQIP awards are available at: www.gov.uk/contracts-finder.