The 'Healthy Weight: Healthy Wales' plan commits to a review of the clinical obesity pathway. What are the time frames for this review, and what do you think are the basic essentials of a clinical obesity pathway for children and young people?
We do have a pathway for managing overweight, and that's been in place since about 2010, I believe, and we do need to bring that up to date in terms of current knowledge and experiences. We've challenged Public Health Wales; we've asked Public Health Wales to undertake a review of that pathway, and they are going through that process now. I'm not sure of exactly the time frame that we have given them for that.
We were asking them to review the pathway before we launch the final strategy in October because, obviously, what we want is for that to inform what that final strategy looks like. So, we'll be looking probably early autumn for them to report back on that.
The second point of your question about what are the essential elements, I mean, they are already there; we need to tweak them and we need to make sure that they're properly delivered. But it's a tiered approach, so, having access to information through schools and through communities and into families is part of the first step of that. And then, if children are overweight, it's a question about how they're identified. There are questions about the ability of the public to recognise large children, so there may be an issue there. But when children are running into issues around weight, what kind of interventions can be put in, either through primary care or through communities through health visitors, et cetera? And then of course we do have—and we've started to shine a light on this, haven't we—the very overweight children. I don't think we have enough in the way of targeted support to be able to support those. There are programmes available, but they're perhaps not universally provided. So, I think there's something about looking at our whole pathway, mapping out what the current evidence now shows us is needed, and then thinking about what is our provision in Wales and what do we need to do to bring that up to the level of the places that are the best.