Never mind patients’ BMIs, what about those of nursing staff!
I don’t consider nursing to be a sedentary profession, yet whenever one sees the all too frequent news footage of UK nursing staff, I’m struck by how many are seriously overweight (and you could probably double that percentage for their US counterparts).
Stress, unsocial working hours, snatching snacks, comfort eating, poor training (not nearly enough emphasis on the importance of good nutrition and the impact on the immune system), nor, indeed the importance of good quality sleep (which again disturbs digestion), cultural background / diet (OH lived in Sierra Leone for a few years and loved the cooking and put on 2 stone).
Also look at the number of medical staff who continue to smoke!
My new MT is clinically obese yet gave me and my OH a lecture on healthy eating, worse than that he referred us to a dietician!
back in the late 60’s in UK, my GP told me about the terrors of smoking whilst brushing off fag ash from his waistcoat 
The ashtray on his desk in the surgery needed emptying too… it was overflowing such that you could not help but think he was a chain smoker - he wreaked of the stuff.
I guess they all have that self belief that they can heal themselves 
Oooh matron !
It is really tricky, in Oz also many of my colleagues were also overweight (as am I). As Sue said it is a combination of many factors, yes we are not stupid and understand that being over weight is not healthy. Living a job where you are often stressed, understaffed, shift work etc etc does not make life easy. if I was on early shift I’d have to be up by 5.30 and leave by about 6.10. I’d often take my toast and coffee to drink in the car (40 minute drive). If we were lucky there would be a quick break to grab some breakfast (I’d usually just have coffee but often there was cakes / chocolates from grateful new mums - hard to resist!). You may or may not have time for a lunch break and if you did it was a quick 20 minutes max to eat (I did try to take my own to keep it fairly healthy). We were supposed to finish at 3.30 - if you had all your paperwork done, which wasn’t always the case particularly if you had a last minute birth or emergency. I usually didn’t get home until gone 4.30 and then had kids etc. FAR too easy to order a takeaway which were cheap and plentiful (in Oz and UK) than start cooking a healthy meal. I did attempt to teach the man shape to cook at this period in our lives!
Night shift is a nightmare, particularly if you have blood sugar issues anyway. When i was working and pregnant (gestational diabetes) I was having to take my BSL regularly - it was just incredible the difference (negative) that night shift had on my levels. I was eventually signed off night shifts as it was so bad. There are studies backing this up for shift workers even if not pregnant! Top this off with snacking to try to stay awake and you have a recipe for disaster.
Then there is the comfort eating, I’m bad enough normally and do tend to stress eat, but imagine when you have just lost a baby or a patient - far too easy to have a little cup cake to help cheer you up.
It is a complex and difficult situation, and as you say it is not a sedentary profession by any means but if you are working full time you are pretty worn out and it is hard to motivate to then go out and do meaningful exercise (of course the irony being when you DO you end up feeling better for it of course!) while trying to juggle a family etc.
And don’t forget that low pay and time poor means more likely to opt for higher calorie cheap food…
The poor pay thing not such an issue in Oz as we are actually very well paid (my Welsh senior ICU nurse SIL actually had tears in her eyes when I showed her the pay scale). I was only on the low end of the pay scale (3rd year) and was on a base of about $30 / hour, Saturday was time and half and Sunday double time, plus extra for evening shifts as well. Put it this way my half pay maternity pay (took half pay to have a year off to come to France for a year - 6 years ago 
) was about €300 more than SMIC!
ETA definately a time thing though, shift work sucks!
Do you think NHS management could do more to facilitate good eating amongst their staff ? Unlike the general public’s obesity, ignorance isn’t the root of the NHS problem, but presumably a workplace surfeit of temptation and absence of fresh food. However, I imagine that away from work, often there’s also ignorance of how to quickly make fresh nutritious meals when you’re tired, short of time and money.
I learned a lot of basic food prep and cooking while still in short trousers - my father died just before my ninth birthday and my mother had to go out to work to support my baby brother and myself. She taught me to prepare the evening meals so that we could eat soon after she arrived home. By the time I became a student, I knew all the cheap cuts of meat, how to buy loose veg at markets and greengrocers. And lastly I’d a new, 1970 set of Elizabeth David paperbacks (A Book of Mediterranean Food, Italian Food, Summer Cooking, French Provincial Cooking and French Country Cooking).
Les animaux se repaissent, l’homme mange, l’homme d’esprit seul sait manger. Brillat-Savarin (1825) Physiologie du gout.
Of course they could. But that assumes there is an appreciation of “we are what we eat” and for so many, sadly, there still isn’t.
My brother was in Atkinson Morley Hospital having a brain tumour removed and the food they provided to patients was appalling. There was also absolutely no appreciation of the impact of anesthetic on taste buds. I used to bring him in smoothies and salads that I made at home. I would love to see high quality smoothie and salad bars (where they really understand nutrition and aren’t just making stuff based on sugar) in every single hospital in the country.
I can’t talk for NHS but for NSW / QLD health. If they had decent kitchens themselves then I think actually providing a hot, nutrious meal (or salad / soup ect) would make a huge difference, particularly if at a cheaper / free cost. I remember days almost falling over from not having eaten since 6.30am and watching the kitchen staff throw away the leftovers from the maternity trolley (the ladies came to the kitchen to collect thier meals on our ward). there was one lady who didn’t adn she would just plate up what was left and leave it in our staff room kitchen. We were always so grateful as meant not having another frozen microwave meal, particularly if we had forgotten food (the canteen wasn’t open that many hours as it was a small hospital) which enevitably meant white bread (if you could find some) toast for your meal.
I think this is a fair interpretation of the reality.
That would be soooooo good! If I had access to yummy salads (with staff discount ) I would definitely have eaten better! I’d have given the smoothies a miss though - too much sugar for me!
Do you know what the budget per head for a meal is? Pennies!!
Not exactly Jane, but I do know it’s ludicrous.
So often the NHS does not surround/protect the amazing cutting edge work that gets done because the money ONLY goes to the sexy stuff. Again, from the experience of my family, my father was in St Thomas’s in his final months and there was the most incredible gerontologist there who greatly helped my father - all fell apart when it came back to manning on the wards / feeding / patient help / support - we would be on the geriatric ward not just helping my father but other patients around because there was no-one (literally no-one) there to attend to their needs.
I thought it WAS the bmi of nursing staff in question, hence the remark about it not being easy (to do that job if your bmi is ‘only’ 30) I’m amazed you have nurses etc with a bmi of 40+.
At the time I began writing my post, the debate was about patient BMIs. I was trying to steer the discussion back to what should be a much simpler problem to address.
I presume it’s not just the patient’s weight that is important, it’s also manipulating all the tubes and
monitoring wires attached to the patient that needs extra hands?
With grateful patients gifting boxes of sweets as they leave hospital its no wonder the wonderful nursing staff are so unhealthy. They are the angels that put everyone before themselves.
Then how many hours of nutrition training do doctor’s receive? The NHS diet information sheet given to patients when required is the same from the 1970’s which is completely wrong.
Sweets, cupcakes, cakes, chocolates - so hard to resist when you are on a busy shift, especially if you haven’t had time to stop for a proper break!
They (the tubes and wires) don’t help, but the main consideration is safety so ideally it is 6 or 8 people to transfer a patient, thin nylon sheets (known as slide or glide sheets) are also used to reduce friction.
It’s a great business model. First feed them meat which has been fed growth hormones, then offer cheap cheap food and plenty of it, all bulked out with the cheapest ingredients and those growth hormones that renders a chicken ready to eat at 6 weeks old (I keep fowl and my cockerels are meat weight by about 6 months). Then when they get obese, sell them the ‘cure’ ; diet clubs, special processed ready meals even weight watchers slimming chocolate eclairs’…
And when their bodies break down, comes the real profit making when they need medical intervention. Of course they die young, meaning they don’t drag on costing the government money and by then, the next generation of ‘profit making units’ is growing up obese.