Weighing up our children’s future
Walsall Teaching Primary Care Trust (Walsall tPCT), in partnership with Education Walsall, has embarked on a new initiative aimed at determining the scale and pattern of excessive weight and obesity in Walsall. The programme, which is currently aimed at children between four and five and ten and eleven, will see the height and weight of over 6400 children measured by the end of this school year. The initiative, which is part of the National Child Measurement Programme, will assist the tPCT and partner agencies in dealing with obesity issues and help develop and target child health strategies and services.
Joanne Kirkby, Co-ordinator for the project, said “In the UK adults and children are becoming more overweight and obese and this is a growing concern. For Walsall we need to know the pattern and scale of this problem. By taking the heights and weights of four to five and ten to eleven year olds we can get accurate information of what is happening now so we can do something about it in the future, and that is something everyone will get the benefit of. That is why it is really important that parents don’t opt their children out of this programme.”
In a preliminary pilot study of a small number of Walsall schools last year, as many as one in five children had height and weight measurements which would classify them as obese and three in ten were either obese or overweight.
Nationally, it has been estimated that 17% of children aged two to ten years were obese in 2005 and a further 16% of boys and 12% of girls were overweight. Obese and overweight children are often targets of teasing and bullying and as such are also more likely to become obese adults. Obesity in adulthood can reduce lives by up to 9 years due to the greater risk of developing serious conditions such as heart disease and diabetes.
