Who should take action?

• Public Health England
• Directors of public health and public health teams
• Academic health networks and other academic institutions
• Local authority, NHS and other local commissioners
• Provider organisations

Actions

• Public Health England is encouraged to develop a framework for monitoring and evaluating integrated community-wide approaches to obesity to ensure consistency and comparability across all local areas.

• Directors of public health and public health teams should develop methods to capture changes in knowledge and attitudes in the community in relation to obesity, such as awareness of what it means to be a healthy weight and the benefits of maintaining a healthy weight.

• Academic health networks and academic institutions should:

• establish links with local practitioners to help with planning, collecting and analysing data on obesity strategies and interventions​

• identify aspects of partnership working or cooperation that can achieve health benefits at a negligible or lower cost (extensive economic modelling of partnership working is not needed on a routine basis).

• All of the above should encourage all partners to measure a broad range of outcomes to capture the full benefits of a sustainable, integrated health and wellbeing strategy.​

• Appropriate outcomes include:

• anthropometric measures such as body mass index (BMI) or waist circumference
  indicators of dietary intake (for example intake of fruit and vegetables or sugar sweetened drinks), physical activity (for example time spent in moderately vigorous activities such as brisk walking) or sedentary behaviour (for example screen time or car use)​

• prevalence of obesity-related diseases​

• wider health outcomes such as indicators of mental health​

• process outcomes such as service use, engagement of disadvantaged groups, establishment or expansion of community groups​

• indicators of structural changes (such as changes to procurement contracts).