Nurse practitioners are changing the lives of patients with obesity through innovative, person-centric treatments.
Health care providers like nurse practitioners (NPs) have made tremendous progress in advancing how obesity is discussed and treated. NPs make it a point to center obesity as a disease — not a personal failing — and as a condition that requires both the buy-in of the individual living with obesity and their health care provider. Fortunately, novel approaches to considering, speaking about and treating obesity are available to all NPs. The American Association of Nurse Practitioners® (AANP) works to provide the latest information on obesity treatments through continuing education (CE) activities, as a topic for podcasts, journal articles and through the creation and curation of an AANP Community solely dedicated to the topic.
Models of Care
NPs are at the forefront of using holistic health care methods to treat their patients, including the Patient-Centered Medical Home Model and Chronic Care Model (CCM). CCM, as “an evidence-based framework aimed toward the prevention and management of chronic disease,” is being utilized in treating obesity. As Barbara Ann Holstein, MSN, FNP, writes in the Journal for Nurse Practitioners (JNP), “NPs, based on their expertise and preparation in patient education, are ideal health care providers to establish partnerships with motivated, informed, chronically ill patients and to promote change in health care policy, guidelines and meeting patient educational needs. Within worksite primary care, NPs can, through the CCM framework, provide chronic disease management and affordable health care access.”
In addition to utilizing different models of care, NPs also take into account social determinants of health (SDoH) when treating patients with obesity. In the Journal of the American Association of Nurse Practitioners (JAANP), Leigh Mullen, DNP, APRN, FNP-C, writes that “screening patients for SDoH allows clinicians to identify those needs and tailor referral efforts.” With SDoH as one framework to understand childhood obesity, she cites a study which “found that if neighborhoods lacked amenities that encouraged physical activity (such as sidewalks, parks, playgrounds, etc.), then the odds for obesity/overweight was 20–45% higher than in neighborhoods with such amenities.”