Understanding the Need for Obesity Competencies in Healthcare Education
Obesity is now widely recognized as a chronic, multifactorial disease that demands coordinated, evidence-based care from a multidisciplinary team. The World Health Organization and European health authorities have underscored obesity as a major public health challenge, with implications for prevention, diagnosis, treatment, and long-term management. Amid this shift, the education and training of healthcare professionals (HCPs) must evolve to reflect current science and patient-centred practices. A recent scoping review synthesizes the existing literature on obesity-related competencies for HCPs and outlines a practical, multi-disciplinary framework to guide curriculum development.
What a Competency-Based Approach Brings to Obesity Education
Competency-based education (CBE) emphasizes observable, measurable performance that demonstrates a learner’s ability to deliver high-quality care. For obesity, CBE helps align entry-level and continuing education with real-world expectations, fosters interprofessional collaboration, and supports uniform standards for assessment and regulation. The scoping review highlights that CBE can bridge knowledge gaps and reduce stigma, ensuring HCPs can engage in meaningful conversations, tailor treatments, and navigate complex care pathways for people living with obesity.
The Scope of Identified Competencies Across HCP Disciplines
Across 22 studies from the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom and Australia, researchers identified eleven broad competency domains with forty-one subdomains. The most emphasized areas were Clinical Assessment and Clinical Management, underscoring the central role of physical evaluation, risk stratification, and evidence-based treatment planning. Notable domains include:
- Clinical Assessment: weight status assessment, diagnostics, and evaluating lifestyle factors and readiness for change.
- Clinical Management: clinical reasoning, exercise and physical activity guidance, nutrition, behaviour change strategies, and patient education, with a strong emphasis on multidisciplinary care.
- Communication: including clinician-patient dialogue, community communication, and interprofessional communication.
- Patient-Centred Care and Professionalism: shared decision making, cultural competence, and ethical standards.
- Public Health/Health Promotion: prevention, health surveillance, and community engagement.
- Health Systems and Advocacy: service development, use of e-health tools, cost awareness, and advocating for obesity care without bias or stigma.
Discipline-specific insights reveal that while some competencies are broadly shared (e.g., communication, professionalism), others reflect unique professional scopes (e.g., pharmacotherapy for obesity or bariatric care). The review also shows a gap in some areas, such as paediatric obesity competencies and the explicit inclusion of clinical psychology—despite substantial overlap with psychological approaches like motivational interviewing and behavioural change techniques.
Implications for Curriculum Design and Policy
The findings support several practical steps for educators and professional bodies. First, a systematic, theory-informed process should guide framework development, with clear purposes, user audiences, and real-world contexts. Second, curricula should embed obesity-related content within both entry-level programs and ongoing professional development, ensuring learners progress toward demonstrable competencies. Third, assessment methods must balance subjective (self-reflection, attitudes) with objective (structured exams, observed clinical tasks) measures to accurately gauge competence.
Interdisciplinary and multisector collaboration is essential. The studies show wide engagement across nursing, physiotherapy, dietetics, pharmacy, radiography and medicine, indicating fertile ground for comprehensive, cross-professional curricula. However, gaps remain—particularly in underrepresented disciplines and paediatric obesity—that warrant targeted development. Incorporating stigma-reduction training as a core, explicit competency is crucial given the documented impact of weight bias on healthcare outcomes.
Moving Toward Effective, Evidence-Based Obesity Education
Healthcare education institutions and accreditation bodies should consider embedding obesity competency frameworks into standards and evaluations. This would promote consistent adoption across programs and ensure graduates are prepared for contemporary obesity care. The reviewed literature also points to ongoing evolution in diagnostic criteria and treatment modalities, reinforcing the need for continual updates to maintain relevance.
The scoping review concludes with a clear call to action: develop, harmonize, and routinely update obesity competencies for HCPs across disciplines to support cohesive, evidence-based, patient-centred care for people living with obesity. The next steps include discipline-specific tailoring, expanding paediatric competencies, and integrating these domains into widely adopted curricula and assessment frameworks.
Conclusion
As obesity care becomes a central component of chronic disease management, competency-based education offers a practical, scalable route to improved HCP readiness. By capturing a comprehensive set of domains and subdomains, educators can design curricula that prepare the workforce to address obesity with knowledge, compassion, and multidisciplinary collaboration.
