9th June 2013
There are notes from the Royal College of Psychiatrists to aid assessment, and some links to other material in this manual below the BMI calculator, as well as a link to the NICE Guideline - Eating Disorders to help shape interventions.
Here is a link to a calculator for BMI (Body Mass Index), or see it below:
Assessing the problem - Body Mass Index (BMI):
Here is a link to a calculator for BMI (Body Mass Index), or see it below:
About the problem:
What to do:
(a) Check for risks to physical health
- Eating disorders have a significant mortality, so proper assessment by an expert is necessary - access this via the General practitioner as a first "port of call" if a doctor is not available to your team.
- If there is significant purging (client is making their self sick multiple times per day) then they will need an urgent medical (physical) check-up as this can be very risky (heart conduction problems, even leading to sudden death due to the imbalance of salts in the bloodstream.)
- If the Body Mass Index is at a dangerous level (check it using the calculator above) then they will need an urgent medical check up, too. This too can cause sudden death, or collapse as blood pressure falls at low weights, and the heart muscle itself wastes.
(b) Interventions
- There is a helpful NICE Guideline - Eating Disorders.
- Below is a link to the NICE recommendations about Eating Disorders pathways:
- Given appropriate specialist guidance (use Thinking Together to consult with a senior colleague if you are unsure of this) and monitoring, there are three interventions for Eating Disorders that are relevant and have a strong evidence base for use in Anorexia, general versions of which are included in this manual:
- If the condition is serious, then work in this field MUST be carried out with proper expert supervision, given the known risks to these clients.
- In addition, MultiFamilyWork and a range of Social-Ecological Work interventions have been used and tested, with encouraging evidence, and are likely support this work (though generally as supportive "augmentation" to the more powerfully-evidenced interventions given above).