Transforming the landscape of obesity education - The Canadian obesity education competencies

Background

With ongoing gaps in obesity education delivery for health professions in Canada and around the world, a transformative shift is needed to address and mitigate weight bias and stigma, and foster evidence-based approaches to obesity assessment and care in the clinical setting. Obesity Canada has created evidence-based obesity competencies for medical education that can guide curriculum development, assessment and evaluation and be applied to health professionals' education programs in Canada and across the world.

Methods

The Obesity Canada Education Action Team has seventeen members in health professions education and research along with students and patient experts. Through an iterative group consensus process using four guiding principles, key and enabling obesity competencies were created using the 2015 CanMEDS competency framework as its foundation. These principles included the representation of all CanMEDS Roles throughout the competencies, minimizing duplication with the original CanMEDS competencies, ensuring obesity focused content was informed by the 2020 Adult Obesity Clinical Practice Guidelines and the 2019 US Obesity Medication Education Collaborative Competencies, and emphasizing patient-focused language throughout.

Results

A total of thirteen key competencies and thirty-seven enabling competencies make up the Canadian Obesity Education Competencies (COECs).

Conclusion

The COECs embed evidence-based approaches to obesity care into one of the most widely used competency-based frameworks in the world, CanMEDS. Crucially, these competencies outline how to address and mitigate the damaging effects of weight bias and stigma in educational and clinical settings. Next steps include the creation of milestones and nested Entrustable Professional Activities, a national report card on obesity education for undergraduate medical education in Canada, and Free Open Access Medication Education content, including podcasts and infographics, for easier adoption into curriculum around the world and across the health professions spectrum.