Wheelchairs and weight: 'I haven't been able to weigh myself for 22 years'

Weight management is a sensitive topic. Nevertheless, the measurement is often used as a marker to inform medical decisions or for someone's personal interest. But for many wheelchair users, accessing scales has proved near impossible.

"The last time I was weighed was about 22 years ago, " Lizzie tells the BBC podcast, Access All. "I think I was about 15."

As a result, now aged 37, Lizzie has been through three successful pregnancies, all without knowing how her body was adapting or how her baby was growing.

Based in Devon, she has a degenerative muscle-related impairment and uses a wheelchair. This makes weighing herself on traditional bathroom scales, which require you to stand still and independently on a small platform, a challenge.

There is equipment out there to help wheelchair users, like Lizzie. Chair scales enable someone to sit on a seat which records their weight and there are similar bed and hoist versions too. There are also wheel-on scales which are very large and involve subtracting the weight of the chair afterwards. But none of these seem widely available.

Dr Georgie Budd, who is based in Merthyr Tydfil, says this worries her. A wheelchair user herself she appreciates how difficult it can be for people to access scales.

"There's a lot of things that we use weight for in health - anaesthetics and drug dosing - and just to keep an eye on it as well for someone's general health. During pregnancy for example, if someone was losing weight I, as a GP, would actually be really quite concerned," she says.

Neither NHS England nor the government have guidance for doctors nor advice on what equipment to use and no figures are kept on how many hospitals have access to such equipment and where they are.

The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) previously considered the issue in 2014 and requested more research be carried out. But so far nothing has been started.

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Source: BBC News, 13 October 2023