GLAD/CELLS Seminar - Weight discrimination in healthcare settings: Reflections on training provision, stigma and legal protection

Weight discrimination within healthcare settings is a growing interdisciplinary field of study. Research has shown the varied form that weight discrimination takes, including the use of (in)appropriate language, the lack of accessible equipment provision and spaces, and the role of body weight in decision-making practices about treatment. Weight discrimination has also been shown to impact people’s well-being and foster a reluctance to seek medical help and support for fear of being stigmatised.

Despite the growing field of weight discrimination research, healthcare professionals are rarely well-versed in non-discriminatory and weight inclusive practices. There is, then, a need for weight discrimination training for HCPs to embed best practice and to treat patients with care and respect. Hence, this paper draws on data collected as part of a HEIF-funded project which seeks to establish the landscape of and need for weight discrimination training in England with the intention of developing new training packages in the future. The research involves (i) making freedom of information requests (FOI) to all hospital Trusts and a sub-population of GP practices in England, (ii) a national questionnaire survey of HCPs from different specialist areas, and (iii) follow-up interviews with HCPs to provide a deeper insight into their experiences and observations.

The paper will provide preliminary reflections on our key findings. Specifically, this involves considering how to critically position weight discrimination and weight discrimination training within medicalised and often hostile healthcare settings where ‘obesity’ and fatness is considered problematic and ‘unhealthy’. We will interrogate how the focus on ‘solving the problem’ of ‘obesity’ often has detrimental effects on higher weight patients despite the imperative to ‘care’ for them. Moreover, we will explore the difficulties of and opportunities for weight discrimination training within a legal context whereby weight is not a straightforwardly ‘protected characteristic’. Indeed, here we will frame the research within recent Fat Studies interventions (see Meadows et al 2020) concerned with the mutability of fatness and concerns expressed around categorising fatness as a ‘disability’ . We would like this latter focus to form the basis of a discussion with colleagues about equality and discrimination legislation as it relates to fatness, weight and body size.

Speakers:

Rachel Colls (rachel.colls@durham.ac.uk), Associate Professor, Department of Geography, Durham University

Rachel is a feminist geographer whose work focuses on embodiment, materiality, fatness and the relationship between bodies and spaces across a range of contexts. This has included conducting research on women’s clothing consumption, weighing and measuring young people in schools, critical analyses of anti-obesity policies and size-acceptance nightclub spaces. She has published over twenty articles in peer reviewed journals and is currently working on a project on the embodied experiences of precarity amongst UK Geography academics.

Kimberly Jamie (kimberly.jamie@durham.ac.uk), Associate Professor, Department of Sociology

Kim is a medical sociologist with interests in the work of healthcare practitioners and scientists, health and medicine in everyday life, and the body (particularly women’s bodies). These interests have most recently come together in research exploring ‘fat’ women’s experiences of healthcare interactions, and beginning to think practically about how these largely negative experiences might be addressed. As well as publishing in academic journals, Kim has also shared her research across the media, in podcasts and through working with producers to put together theatre productions exploring contemporary scientific debates.

If you are unable to attend the event in person, and would like to attend the event via Zoom, please sign up using the following link: https://durhamuniversity.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_zTtanVPkSo2tEgVAYwmAEQ