- A University of Warwick-led study evaluating the Gro Health W8Buddy digital Tier 3 weight management pathway has opened its first recruitment site and published its protocol in BMJ Open.
- The NIHR-funded, real-world patient-choice study will recruit 450 participants across four specialist services in England and Wales and track outcomes over 18 and 24 months.
- The research will assess whether a digitally enabled pathway can deliver comparable long-term benefits to standard services while improving access, reducing waits and supporting a shift towards community-delivered care.
A University of Warwick study evaluating W8Buddy, a digital specialist weight management service, has begun patient recruitment and could help address the NHS capacity gap in obesity care.
Obesity affects more than a quarter of the UK population.
While around four million people could be eligible for NHS Specialist Weight Management Services each year, current capacity is estimated at roughly 35,000 patients.
With growing national focus on scalable, holistic approaches to weight management, including recent government investment in innovative digital and community-based models of care, there is increasing interest in new ways to widen access while maintaining clinical quality.
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-funded study will assess whether the digital pathway, delivered through the Gro Health W8Buddy platform, can offer comparable long-term health benefits to standard NHS specialist services while improving access for patients who may otherwise face long waits or limited availability.
Dr Petra Hanson, Clinical Lecturer at Warwick Medical School and clinician at University Hospitals Coventry and Warwickshire NHS Trust, and lead for the trial, said: “This is the first real-world evaluation of digitally enabled specialist weight management services in the UK. In this patient-choice study, we will recruit 450 participants from four Specialist Weight Management Services across England and Wales, allowing individuals to choose how they would like their care to be delivered.
“The W8Buddy study will provide the evidence needed to understand how best to implement digital specialist weight management within NHS services, supporting a shift from hospital-based to community-delivered care and from analogue pathways to digital ones.”
Gro Health W8Buddy is a bespoke digital platform developed by DDM and University Hospitals Coventry and Warwickshire NHS Trust specialist weight management clinicians to support NHS Tier 3 Specialist Weight Management Services.
It provides holistic support outside the hospital setting, including education, behaviour change resources, meal and activity tracking and health coaching.
The platform is designed to support sustainable lifestyle changes, including improving diet, increasing physical activity, smoking cessation and weight loss.
The first recruitment sites opened last month in Birmingham and London. New sites are expected to open at University Hospitals Coventry and Warwickshire NHS Trust and in Wales in early 2026.
Patients will be recruited from existing waiting lists, with researchers tracking key outcomes including weight loss, quality of life, treatment speed, use of other healthcare resources and overall health improvements at 18 and 24 months.
Dr Jonathan Hazlehurst, Consultant Endocrinologist at University Hospital Birmingham NHS Foundation Trust, who is overseeing the Birmingham site, said: “This study represents an exciting opportunity to look at new ways of delivering obesity care in a robust and rigorous way as we look to ultimately widen access to care and reduce health inequalities at scale for people living with obesity. We are pleased to contribute to this study, which is embedded within our current processes.
“Unusually we are not inviting people to apply to this study outside of our pathways as this is very much a pragmatic study incorporated into our current referral processes. We hope and anticipate that the results can inform future pathways and funding decisions to improve access to care and management pathways for people living with obesity.”
Patient involvement has been central to setting up the W8Buddy trial. Richard Green, an IT professional living with type 2 diabetes who has struggled with weight for most of his life, has used his experience of repeated attempts at weight loss programmes to help shape the tool from a patient perspective.
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Richard Green, W8Buddy PPI Lead, said: “Leaning on my own experiences of the system, such as waiting three months for an appointment only to be told to go away and keep a food diary, I wanted to understand why the system was not meeting patient needs.
“People talk about the postcode lottery in NHS care. It’s an understandable frustration, though not entirely fair – we cannot put a heart specialist on every island around our coastline. But weight management is different.
“When I met Dr Hanson nearly six years ago, we wanted to know if we could do this differently. And with digital tools, we can level that playing field. W8Buddy could be how we finally close that gap – not by building more clinics but by bringing the expertise to wherever patients are.
“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.”
The findings from the W8Buddy study could have significant implications for how specialist weight management services are delivered nationally.
By evaluating digital approaches alongside traditional care in routine settings, the research aims to support more equitable, efficient and accessible obesity treatment across the UK.
