Senior Lecturer and Course Co-ordinator Amanda Wray and Nick Wray were invited to attend the 4th Annual conference of the Chinese society for Metabolic and Bariatric Surgery and the 2nd IFSO Symposium China, held on 14th-17th September in Guangzhou, China.
Bariatric surgery to treat obesity is well established in Western countries and now fast becoming more popular in China. The introduction of obesity surgery to treat morbid obesity has become more popular in the last 10years. Consequently, they have not yet developed guidelines for a standardised approach to surgery and treatment management.
Amanda and Nick were invited by Prof Cunchan Wang (CSMBS Chairman) to facilitate a workshop titled “nutrition management in metabolic and bariatric surgery’, with the aim of establishing draft nutritional guideline consensus for bariatric surgery patients. The workshop involved presenting the available evidence and participants used electronic voting to register their vote on fourteen key nutritional issues. Topics included who the key members of the multidisciplinary team should include through to pre and post-surgical blood screening for nutritional deficiencies.
Being the only dietitians invited to speak at the conference, they also presented on ‘Nutritional deficiency after bariatric surgery’ and a casestudy focused on Thiamine deficiency post-surgery, entitled “Nutritional Disaster after bariatric surgery”. The profession of Dietetics is not well recognised in China however the interest in nutrition by the Chinese delegation was significant and hopefully may work towards raising the profile of dietetics in China.