Patient Recruitment Starts for Major Weight Study
A new University of Warwick study evaluating W8Buddy, a digital specialist weight management service, has started patient recruitment, offering a solution to improve access to obesity care across the NHS.
Obesity affects more than a quarter of the UK population and while around four million people could be eligible for NHS Specialist Weight Management Services each year, current capacity is limited to approximately 35,000 patients. There is growing national recognition of the need for new, scalable, and holistic approaches to weight management, including recent government investment in innovative digital and community-based models of care.
Against this backdrop, the W8Buddy study- a major real-world evaluation of a digitally delivered specialist weight management pathway- has officially opened its first site for patient recruitment and published its study protocol in BMJ Open.
The National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) funded study will assess whether the digital pathway, delivered through the Gro Health W8Buddy platform, can provide comparable long-term health benefits to standard NHS specialist services, while improving access for patients who may otherwise face long waits or limited availability.
Gro Health W8Buddy is a bespoke digital platform developed by DDM and University Hospitals Coventry and Warwickshire (UHCW) NHS Trust specialist weight management clinicians to support NHS Tier 3 Specialist Weight Management Services. The platform provides holistic support outside of the hospital setting, including education, behaviour change resources, meal and activity tracking, and health coaching. It is designed to support sustainable lifestyle changes such as improving diet, increasing physical activity, smoking cessation, and weight loss.
Last month saw the first recruitment sites open in Birmingham and London, with new sites set to open at UHCW NHS Trust and in Wales in early 2026. Patients will be recruited from existing waiting lists and researchers will track key outcomes such as weight loss, quality of life, treatment speed, use of other healthcare resources, and overall health improvements over 18- and 24-month periods.
Patient involvement has been crucial to the setup of the W8Buddy trial. Richard Green, an IT professional who lives with type 2 diabetes and has struggled with weight all his life. He has used his experience of trying and failing weight loss programmes to help the team develop the tool from a patient’s perspective.
“W8Buddy connects patients nationally to specialist resources based on what they actually need. A shepherd on top of a Welsh mountain gets the same access to expert support as someone in central London. That’s not an app – that’s a programme that plugs you directly into NHS specialists and real human support. Nothing else does that.”
With obesity estimated to cost the NHS more than £11 billion per year, the findings from the W8Buddy study could have significant implications for how specialist weight management services are delivered nationally. By exploring digital approaches alongside traditional care, the research aims to support more equitable, efficient, and accessible obesity treatment for patients across the UK.
https://warwick.ac.uk/news/pressreleases/patient-recruitment-begins-for-real-world-digital-weight-management-study
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