Bariatric Surgery Success: The Importance of a Multidisciplinary Approach

Healthcare professionals are usually trained in one particular discipline. But, as a patient seeking bariatric surgery, your weight relates to many different areas of your life.

Treating one area in isolation isn’t likely to work very well. You need a multidisciplinary team.

What is a multidisciplinary team?

A multidisciplinary team is a group of qualified healthcare professionals who are each trained in a different discipline but work together. The team members each provide a different aspect of care based on their own expertise, meaning you’ll often have several appointments with different professionals.

Crucially, though, they do need to work as a team. They’ll come together to discuss their recommendations and develop a coordinated treatment plan that’s comprehensive but not overwhelming for you.

What makes Dr Lockie’s approach to weight loss different?

Obesity is rarely caused by one factor in our lives. It’s the result of a complex interplay between your genetics, family history, lifestyle, environment and psychology.

Australia faces a growing obesity epidemic, with statistics from 2019 showing 5.8 million Australians currently live with obesity – about 31.3% of the country’s population.

In 2017–18, around 1 in 4 (24%) of Australian children aged 5-14 were overweight (17%) or obese (7.7%).

If losing weight was easy, you and every other person struggling with their weight would have done it already. There are many challenges to overcome in changing your lifestyle, activity levels and food intake to reach and maintain a healthy weight.

Surgery is one, very significant, part of your weight-loss treatment. But you need a range of other support to help you succeed.

Access to a multidisciplinary team who can guide you through your weight loss journey helps by:

• Examining all the factors that contributed to your weight gain

• Forming a range of strategies to help you manage your weight pre and post surgery

Our multidisciplinary team approach

Although bariatric surgery kick-starts your weight loss, it is not a ‘miracle cure’. Significant dietary, psychological and lifestyle changes are required post surgery.

We start that process before your surgery with education sessions to increase your knowledge and skills and to provide support.

The weight can creep back on over time so we provide long-term support to:

• Address weight gain at an early stage

• Improve long-term weight and psychosocial outcomes

• Help you achieve and maintain optimal weight loss for many years to come.

We don’t complete your operation and send you on your way. Instead, we support you indefinitely to implement and maintain the changes required to achieve and sustain long-term weight maintenance.

Your surgical team

Bariatric surgery has been shown to help people lose weight and keep it off. A Swedish study of over 2,000 obese people who had bariatric surgery found that, compared to a similar group of obese people who did not have surgery, those people who did were much more successful in controlling their weight over the next 20 years. The surgery group also lived longer and had lower rates of diabetes, heart attack, stroke and cancer.

Your surgical team oversees your operation and all related procedures. They will be integral to your weight loss journey.

There are several different types of bariatric surgery, but all work to make your stomach much smaller, which causes you to feel full after eating only a small amount of food.

The main types of bariatric surgery are:

• Gastric bypass, where a small stomach pouch is created by stapling. This is joined directly to the small intestine after some of the intestine has been removed. Food bypasses most of the stomach and fewer calories are absorbed.

• Gastric sleeve surgery, where most of the stomach is removed, including the part that makes a hormone which makes you feel hungry.

• Single Anastomosis Duodenal Bypass (SADI), where most of the stomach is removed (similar to a gastric sleeve surgery). The first part of the small intestine is then detached and reattached to a loop of intestine further down. Food then bypasses the metabolically active part of the intestine. This results in hormonal changes which are seen to have a positive affect on the metabolism.

Your psychologist

You’ll be partnered with a psychologist who will help you identify and address any underlying emotional issues that have been preventing you from losing excess weight. This will help you break any negative patterns and form healthier habits moving forward.

Your dietitian

Dietitians help people to understand the relationship between food and health. They also help people change their diet so that they can become healthier, and stay healthier. Your dietitian will help you adjust to life after your surgery and understand how to enjoy a healthy, varied diet.

Exercise physiologist

Exercise physiologists apply their extensive knowledge of human movement and exercise with a therapeutic approach aiming to improve quality of life, disease management or treatment outcomes across all populations.

We refer you to an exercise physiologist that we work very closely with. They offer classes and support to all our patients and will help you learn and adjust to a new exercise regime after your surgery.

After your consultations with our dietitian and psychologist, additional phone consultations will provide ongoing support and minimise barriers such as time, distance and cost.

Having a team of highly-qualified professionals at their disposal is the reason many patients of Dr Lockie successfully lose weight and keep it off for the long-term. See Dr Lockies Weight Loss Success Rate Comparison.

If you’d like to learn more about our multidisciplinary approach to weight loss and how it could benefit you, then please contact us.

Disclaimer

All information is general in nature. Patients should consider their own personal circumstances and seek a second opinion. Any surgical or invasive procedure carries risks.