To the Editor: With obesity reaching epidemic proportions in Australia, professional education needs to reflect this increase in prevalence. Research has shown that health professionals’ lack of knowledge is a common barrier to providing care for overweight and obese individuals.1-3 We investigated the coverage of obesity education in university medical, dietetic and nursing curricula (partially replicating the earlier study in the Journal by Campbell and Welborn4), and also the extent to which obesity was covered in the curricula of selected professional specialist colleges in Australia. Contact hours for obesity were compared against two “control diseases”, diabetes and depression.

Surveys were sent to 15 medical schools, and administrators of six dietetic courses and six nursing courses in Australia. The survey asked questions including the total number of contact hours in the course for each topic, and if additional teaching was needed. Most college curricula were publicly available, as were the Continuing Medical Education events and topics.

Nine of the 15 medical schools and three of the six dietetic and nursing courses returned the questionnaire. Because of the nature of the data and the very small sample sizes, no statistical analysis was conducted. In the medicine curriculum, while variation in mean contact hours between obesity, diabetes and depression was small, the range was quite large (Box). There was also wide variation in the contact hours for obesity education in the nursing curriculum. The median contact hours for obesity education were half that of both depression and diabetes, and one university reported zero contact hours for obesity education.

With the exception of the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners, the colleges surveyed did not include obesity in the prescribed teaching curriculum. Several professional education topics were available on obesity, but considerably more were available relating to diabetes and depression.

Our findings indicate that most of the universities appear to provide undergraduate students with adequate contact hours for education about obesity. The professional training provided by the individual specialist medical colleges is not as comprehensive, and lacks specific obesity education. Based on these findings, more systematic research is needed to examine the details of training and to develop programs which better equip health professionals to deal with the growing burden of obesity and related diseases. Future research should not be limited to measuring contact hours — the focus should extend to investigating the content of courses and professional development programs, and to examining the barriers to including obesity education.