At Upper GI Surgery we are pioneers of weight loss surgery here in Australia. One aspect that differentiates our surgery from others is our comprehensive post-operative care of patients. Weight loss surgery is part of a much larger process involving a complete change in lifestyle – it is our post-operative care that addresses this major change that our patients have to learn to live with everyday.
Following your weight loss surgery you are then required to have follow up appointments with our GP, our dietitian and psychologist. The appointments happen at 3 months, 9 months and 18 months post-surgery. These appointments are to ensure that you are ‘on track’ following surgery and that you are in good health and essentially losing weight.
In addition to your follow up appointments we also offer quarterly support group meetings for our patients, encouraging them to attend regularly to help keep them on track. At our support groups we discuss different topics that are related to weight loss such as diet, exercise, plastic surgery to name a few, often with guest speakers to come and share their experience or expertise.
Following the ongoing success of our support group meetings we have now introduced a new option for patient follow up called ‘Multidisciplinary Patient Education Sessions’. These are group based sessions with talks from our GP, dietitian and psychologist all in the one sitting. Essentially rather than having three individual appointments with each of our team following your surgery, you can instead choose to attend the group sessions that covers all bases.
How do they work?
We run these sessions at three different intervals post weight loss surgery; 3 months, 9 months and 18 months. You will be invited by one of our team to attend the session that is suited to your time frame, and the sessions are held at our Upper GI Surgery office. Each session is tailored to the information that you require at your time frame following surgery.
Due to the success of our support group meetings we felt that it would be beneficial for patients to not only receive all of the information they require in one go, but also to be able to interact and meet other patients who are in the same or similar situations to them. This allows you to then share experiences and learn from each other at a greater level than before. Group discussions are a great arena for debates and questions, providing more insight than ever before.
Our first Multidisciplinary Patient Education session
Each month Upper GI Surgery will hold a different session. Our first was for 3 month post-op patients which happened recently, the next will be 9 months and the following will be 18 months. As with all of our sessions we ask for feedback from our patients to ensure that we are achieving what we set out to and are covering all necessary information that patients need to know.
We had great feedback from our first session, with all patients agreeing that the topics covered were helpful, timely and interesting. Our patients enjoyed the subjects that were covered as well as finding it useful to meet other patients in the same situation.
We believe that our extensive support following weight loss surgery allows our patients a higher chance of losing excess weight as well as learning to deal with the lifelong battle of not regaining weight.
If you are a patient of Upper GI Surgery and are interested in attending on of our Multidisciplinary Patient Education sessions or would like to know more about them, then please give our team a call on 02 9553 1120 or contact us online.
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