Healthy Weight for Life programme: Evaluating the practice and effectiveness of a weight loss maintenance programme in the private health insurance setting

BACKGROUND: Australian private health insurers are increasingly involved in the delivery of chronic disease management programmes to their members, recognising the importance of decreasing and managing lifestyle risk factors and the impact such factors have on health service utilisation. One such secondary prevention programme is the Healthy Weight for Life programme, an intensive weight loss and lifestyle modification programme that has been designed for overweight and obese private health insurance members in Australia. Together with the insurer, the Healthy Weight for Life service provider developed and implemented a long-term maintenance programme that supports participants who complete the Healthy Weight for Life programme to maintain the weight loss they achieved during the programme. Various studies have shown that evidence-based weight management programmes can be effective; however, the results may vary in different contexts. OBJECTIVE: This article presents the evaluation rationale and framework designed to assess the process and impact of the long-term maintenance programme on weight loss maintenance, other health-related benefits and participants’ experience with the programme. METHODS: The evaluation will comprise a number of inter-related sub-studies balancing evaluation of programme effectiveness and implementation. The maintenance programme presented a unique opportunity for researchers to partner with private health insurance and a service provider to assess a real-world programme in the under-researched area of weight loss maintenance in this setting and emphasises the importance of evaluating such programmes given the potential the private health insurance context has in the future delivery of health care.