Improving Eating Disorder Screening in a Pediatric Weight Management Clinic

Background: Adolescents with obesity are at higher risk of disordered eating than the general population, thus detection of eating disorders (ED) is necessary in pediatric weight management clinics (PWMC). Screening questionnaires may aid early detection of ED and PWMC can help manage ED, specifical...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Obesity (Silver Spring, Md.) Md.), 2022-11, Vol.30, p.101-101
Main Authors: Fernandez, Cristina, Beck, Amy, Clark, Nicholas, Gould, Sara, Nos, Andrea, Laroche, Helena, Sweeney, Brooke, Edwards, Lora, Moran, Amy, Dean, Kelsey, Perera, Rachel, Hughes, Kimberly, Hampl, Sarah, Tucker, Jared, Chaves, Eileen
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Binge eating
Eating disorders
Pediatrics
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Summary:Background: Adolescents with obesity are at higher risk of disordered eating than the general population, thus detection of eating disorders (ED) is necessary in pediatric weight management clinics (PWMC). Screening questionnaires may aid early detection of ED and PWMC can help manage ED, specifically bulimia and binge eating disorders (BED). From 2016-2021, our WMC providers diagnosed more BED than other institution clinics; yet may still be underdiagnosing ED. We aimed to increase ED screening rates for new patients >12 years old presenting to our PWMC from 40% to 90% in 6 months. Methods: Our PWMC is part of a tertiary care childrens hospital. A multidisciplinary team used an A3 improvement framework. The outcome measure was mean monthly percent of ED screening documentation by PWMC providers. We trained providers to implement an updated 9-question ED screen in our 1st Plan-Do-StudyAct (PDSA) cycle. In our 2nd PDSA cycle, we replaced the screener with the validated 10-question Adolescent Binge Eating Scale (ADO-BED). Results: There were 115 patients included during the project (11/2021-5/2022). Outcome measure performance increased from a mean of 40% to 95% with special cause variation achieved by Month 6 (5/2022). Conclusions: We met our aim to successfully screen >90% of new PWMC patients >12 years old for ED. Next steps include collaborating with a national group of PWMCs to study how other PWMCs are diagnosing eating disorders. This project will aid understanding of barriers and potential supports for PWMC ED screening.
ISSN:1930-7381
1930-739X