McGill Bronwyn, O'Hara Blythe J, Grunseit Anne C, Bauman Adrian, Lawler Luke, Phongsavan Philayrath
The University of Sydney, Sydney School of Public Health, Prevention Research Collaboration, Charles Perkins Centre, Camperdown, NSW, Australia.
The Australian Prevention Partnership Centre, Ultimo, NSW, Australia.
SAGE Open Med. 2019 Aug 30;7:2050312119873814. doi: 10.1177/2050312119873814. eCollection 2019.
Australian private health insurers are increasingly involved in the delivery of chronic disease management programmes to their members, recognising the importance of decreasing and managing lifestyle risk factors and the impact such factors have on health service utilisation. One such secondary prevention programme is the Healthy Weight for Life programme, an intensive weight loss and lifestyle modification programme that has been designed for overweight and obese private health insurance members in Australia. Together with the insurer, the Healthy Weight for Life service provider developed and implemented a long-term maintenance programme that supports participants who complete the Healthy Weight for Life programme to maintain the weight loss they achieved during the programme. Various studies have shown that evidence-based weight management programmes can be effective; however, the results may vary in different contexts.
This article presents the evaluation rationale and framework designed to assess the process and impact of the long-term maintenance programme on weight loss maintenance, other health-related benefits and participants' experience with the programme.
The evaluation will comprise a number of inter-related sub-studies balancing evaluation of programme effectiveness and implementation. The maintenance programme presented a unique opportunity for researchers to partner with private health insurance and a service provider to assess a real-world programme in the under-researched area of weight loss maintenance in this setting and emphasises the importance of evaluating such programmes given the potential the private health insurance context has in the future delivery of health care.
澳大利亚的私人健康保险公司越来越多地参与为其会员提供慢性病管理项目，认识到降低和管理生活方式风险因素以及这些因素对医疗服务利用的影响的重要性。“健康生活体重”项目就是这样一个二级预防项目，它是一个针对澳大利亚超重和肥胖的私人健康保险会员设计的强化减肥和生活方式改变项目。“健康生活体重”服务提供商与保险公司共同制定并实施了一项长期维持项目，该项目为完成“健康生活体重”项目的参与者提供支持，以维持他们在项目期间所实现的体重减轻。各种研究表明，基于证据的体重管理项目可能是有效的；然而，结果在不同背景下可能会有所不同。
本文介绍了评估长期维持项目对体重减轻维持、其他与健康相关的益处以及参与者对该项目体验的过程和影响的评估基本原理和框架。
该评估将包括一些相互关联的子研究，平衡对项目有效性和实施情况的评估。维持项目为研究人员提供了一个独特的机会，使其能够与私人健康保险公司和服务提供商合作，在这个背景下对减肥维持这一研究较少的领域中的一个实际项目进行评估，并强调鉴于私人健康保险背景在未来医疗保健提供方面的潜力，评估此类项目的重要性。
