A new University of Warwick study evaluating W8Buddy, a digital specialist weight management service, has started patient recruitment, offering a solution to improve access to obesity care across the NHS.
Obesity affects more than a quarter of the UK population and while around four million people could be eligible for NHS Specialist Weight Management Services each year, current capacity is limited to approximately 35,000 patients. There is growing national recognition of the need for new, scalable, and holistic approaches to weight management, including recent government investment in innovative digital and community-based models of care.
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 (NIHR) funded study will assess whether the digital pathway, delivered through the Gro Health W8Buddy platform, can provide 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 the lead on 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 4 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 (UHCW) NHS Trust specialist weight management clinicians to support NHS Tier 3 Specialist Weight Management Services. The platform provides holistic support outside of the hospital setting, including education, behaviour change resources, meal and activity tracking, and health coaching. It is designed to support sustainable lifestyle changes such as improving diet, increasing physical activity, smoking cessation, and weight loss.
Prof Amy Grove, Professor of Implementation Science at University of Birmingham who co-leads the study said: "As researchers we value the opportunity to rigorously evaluate health care innovation as it happens. By using real-world evidence, the NHS can ensure research is shaped by what actually happens to patients in routine weight management care. Real-world evidence allows the NHS to bridge the gap between clinical research and everyday care, ensuring that research reflects the realities of patients' lives and leads to more meaningful, scalable improvements in health outcomes. Incorporating real-world evidence with patients' real-world experience helps to design studies and treatments that are more inclusive, relevant, and impactful."
Last month saw the first recruitment sites open in Birmingham and London, with new sites set to open at UHCW NHS Trust and in Wales in early 2026. Patients will be recruited from existing waiting lists and researchers will track key outcomes such as weight loss, quality of life, treatment speed, use of other healthcare resources, and overall health improvements over 18- and 24-month periods.
Dr. Jonathan Hazlehurst, Consultant Endocrinologist, University Hospital Birmingham NHS Foundation Trust, who is overseeing the site in Birmingham 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 crucial to the setup of the W8Buddy trial. Richard Green, an IT professional who lives with type 2 diabetes and has struggled with weight all his life. He has used his experience of trying and failing weight loss programmes to help the team develop the tool from a patient's perspective.
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."
With obesity estimated to cost the NHS more than £11 billion per year, the findings from the W8Buddy study could have significant implications for how specialist weight management services are delivered nationally. By exploring digital approaches alongside traditional care, the research aims to support more equitable, efficient, and accessible obesity treatment for patients across the UK.
