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Open Review BMI Use in NHS Treatment Decisions

Created by Sara Louise allen
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We believe BMI is an outdated system that judges health using only height and weight. It ignores fitness, lifestyle and body composition, and can affect NHS treatment access and waiting list priority.

We call on the Government to review the use of BMI with a view to its being replaced with fairer, evidence-based health assessments. We believe that BMI is an outdated method of measuring health that relies only on height and weight only, while ignoring fitness, muscle mass, lifestyle and overall wellbeing. It can often label healthy people as obese and is often used to determine NHS treatment access and waiting list priority, unfairly delaying care for some patients. Health assessments should reflect modern science, individual circumstances and overall health, not just a number on a scale. Health is more than height and weight.

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    This petition will stay open until 15 December 2026.