Depressed, anxious and breathless missing out: Weight screening in general practice in a regional catchment of New South Wales

Objective: To assess the recording status of weight management measures among adults presenting to general practices within regional catchments.

Design: Cross-sectional; secondary data analysis.

Setting: Primary health care - 17 general practices located in the Illawarra Shoalhaven region of regional New South Wales.

Participants: A subset of the Sentinel Practices Data Sourcing project database (n = 118 709 adults) that included information on demographic indicators, chronic disease status, and obesity and overweight-specific measurement indicators recorded from September 2011 to September 2013.

Main outcome measures: Proportions of coded recording of quantitative measures of overweight and obesity - body mass index (BMI) and waist circumference, and likelihood of BMI recording (odds ratios (ORs)) by various clinical diagnosis and counts of recorded conditions.

Results: Of the patients, 30.9% had a BMI recorded and only 8.0% had a waist circumference recorded in their electronic medical records. There were variations in BMI recording across age with those aged 45-64 years more likely (aOR = 1.25; 95% confidence interval (CI), 1.21-1.29; P-value < 0.001) to have a recorded BMI. Patients with mental health conditions (a OR = 0.80; 95% CI, 0.76-0.84; P-value < 0.001) and patients with respiratory conditions (aOR = 0.91; 95% CI, 0.86-0.96; P-value = 0.001) were significantly less likely to have a BMI recorded.

Conclusions: Recording of measures of obesity and overweight in general practices within regional settings is much lower than optimal. More support and advocacy around weighing patients at all interactions is required for regional general practitioners to increase the weight screening in primary care. These findings have policy-relevant implications for weight management in regional Australia.