New suite of online training modules, Conversations About Weight, is empowering health professionals to play a more central role in supporting their patients to improve health and wellbeing outcomes, including guiding sensitive conversations around weight.
Conversations about weight can be challenging for both health professionals and patients alike. Hesitancy among health professionals to discuss weight, along with stigma, shame and other psychological factors often acting as barriers to people seeking or getting the support they need.
The training focuses on the various aspects of weight management, including causes and support strategies, taking the perspective of both patient and health professional. Each module provides insight into the complexity of this topic, to empower health professionals to support patients and guide these sensitive, yet important conversations.
Conversations About Weight will support you to:
- Understand the multitude of factors to be considered when discussing weight, which can help you tailor conversations, education and treatments to the patient’s individual circumstances.
- Understand how the language used in conversations about weight can impact on an individual and help or hinder their approach and learn to recognise and adopt language that minimises weight-stigma.
- Explore strategies that can been used for weight loss, together with strategies that can be used to support an individual to improve their physical, emotional and mental health.
- Understand how to support a patient to adopt and maintain health behaviour change that incorporates person-centred action planning.
- Explore counselling techniques that can help to activate a person to make the health behaviour changes necessary for weight loss/maintenance.
Developed by Diabetes WA and CPD accredited by the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners, Conversations About Weight includes six modules, approximately one hour per module, with two RACGP CPD points allocated per module.
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