Nutrition must be central to GP training, say experts
Medical schools failing to teach students how to deal with problems linked to patients’ lifestyle and diet
THE training of GPS is outdated and needs to teach young doctors about the importance of nutrition and healthy eating, experts have claimed.
Family doctors, medical students and researchers accused medical schools of failing to give practical, relevant training to address medical problems linked to lifestyle and diet, such as obesity, Type 2 diabetes and depression.
Harrison Carter, co-chairman of the British Medical Association’s students committee, called for nutritional information to be an “integral part of a medical education and respected for the importance it has towards future patient care”.
“Nutrition hasn’t been treated as an important science within medical education,” Mr Carter told The Daily Telegraph, despite that the fact it is linked to an ever-increasing “burden of disease” within the NHS. “For particular subsets of patients in hospitals, such as those who are trying to recover from surgery, one of the things that has to be optimised is their nutrition,” he said.
“Yet we know from talking to medical students that they feel underprepared to be able to manage patients’ nutrition in the hospital setting.”
Mr Harrison, who has been working with the University of Cambridge’s NNEDPRO Global Centre for Nutrition and Health, said: “Lifestyle diseases are becoming a particular problem within the NHS, and we have all sorts of nutrition deficiencies, particularly in elderly populations.
“Malnutrition screening occurs in hospitals, but it’s seen as a box-ticking exercise in lots of cases. We want everybody to screened, and when a patient is identified as being at risk they get the appropriate advice. We have people who are overnourished and becoming obese, which is a strong risk factor or predictor of cancer”.
The NHS is expected to spend upwards of £10billion this year on diabetes alone, with the UK currently ranked the fattest country in Europe. One GP told the BBC he believed eight out of 10 patients attending his surgery had preventable conditions that could be improved through better nutrition.
Dr Rangan Chatterjee, GP and presenter of BBC One’s Doctor in the House, said: “The health landscape of the UK has dramatically changed over the last 30 or 40 years and I think the bulk of what I see as a GP now – almost 80 per cent – is in some way driven by our collective lifestyles.”
Mr Carter said hospital food had “improved” in recent years, but that there were “lots of other things around the provision of food” that needed to show similar progress, including highlighting the importance of meal times.
Medical schools are responsible for drawing up their own curricula, although they are required to follow guidance and standards set by the General Medical Council (GMC).
The GMC is in the process of reviewing those guidelines, while some universities have pledged to significantly increase the amount of nutrition science taught as part of their medical degrees.