NDR-UK Development Officer Jenni Henderson wrote earlier this week about the work she has been doing to update our resources to educate patients and carers to improve paediatric weight management. While National Obesity Awareness Week aims to raise awareness about obesity and how to improve health and well-being through maintaining a healthy weight, I thought I would take this opportunity to highlight our work to support people within Tier 4 Weight Management services, and more specifically, to show what can be achieved through working together to improve patient outcomes.

Partnership working is fundamental to the ethos of NDR-UK. Our existence and core values are based in bringing together expertise to create materials for the benefit of wider audiences of peer health professionals and, ultimately, their patients or clients.

Our support for Tier 4 services has been made possible through working with two key partners – British Obesity and Metabolic Surgery Society (BOMSS) and NHS Ayrshire and Arran. Together we are able to offer specialist dietitians high quality information resources to support people who have received bariatric surgery.

The approaches taken with these partners were quite different but ultimately achieve the same goal.

Our resources covering three different bariatric surgery methods were developed with specialist dietitians from BOMSS, following our information production process. Since 2014/2015, we estimate that almost 7,000 people undergoing such surgery will have been supported through our resources.

Our partnership with NHS Ayrshire and Arran followed a different path.  Specialist dietitians had already developed and were actively using two resources to prepare patients for their surgery and support them through recovery from it.  They knew from discussions across their networks with colleagues across the UK that these were much needed elsewhere. By working with us, we were able to adopt, print and supply these titles to all who need them. “Recipes for Life” has become one of our most popular titles, with over 1500 distributed so far to patients who have had sleeve gastrectomy or gastric bypass surgery. This unique recipe book supports patients prepare, cook and appropriately modify the texture of meals that are high in protein, low in fat and calories, to optimise their recovery and return to good health.

As a social enterprise, our resources are sold on a cost-recovery basis, which includes a financial return to our partners based on volumes sold. These are just two examples of our joint working arrangements with other organisations. We are always interested to hear of other potential joint projects – do you have any ideas that you think we could create in partnership? Please get in touch - we'd love to speak to you about any opportunities.