Evaluating public health interventions for obesity from the perspective of local health authorities

This paper has been produced on request from the DH and is designed as a discussion document intended for dissemination to policy makers to help identify areas around which joint discussions would be useful in terms of identifying potential ideas, issues and questions relating to the project remit.

Scoping searches

In February and March 2011, we conducted a series of scoping searches covering both clinical databases and the internet (see Annex 2 for detailed results and methods). The object was to identify interventions or studies, devised to prevent or manage obesity, and funded by local authorities or public bodies in the Sheffield area. Given the local and specialist nature of the materials sought, the majority of relevant data are unlikely to be identified in the large health care databases such as Medline. Our findings from the scoping searches suggest that these data will be found by searching the internet to identify key schemes in a specific area and through contacting principal staff involved with the schemes.