Kara Evers is doing her best to tip the scales in Nova Scotia’s favour when it comes to better educating and strengthening treatment options for patients struggling with clinical obesity.
The nurse practitioner and Nova Scotia Health’s bariatric surgery program coordinator takes new steps this year, spreading awareness concurrently with the Nova Scotia Sisterhood. Evers landed a $50,000 grant via the 2024 Novo Nordisk Community Prevention and Wellness Fund, a partnership involving the province and Denmark-based healthcare firm Novo Nordisk Canada Inc.
The Danish company identified “Black communities in Nova Scotia” as priority recipients for the launch of this fund. Evers reached out to the Nova Scotia Sisterhood, a free province-wide initiative supporting Black women, to collaborate with local Black communities.
“The Black community is identified as an underserved population,” said Evers, who works out of the Victoria General Hospital. “We’ll have virtual town halls" surrounding obesity education and prevention, with the overall objective to improve health and wellbeing. Evers has a year to carry out the intent of the grant. There is a chance the funding could be renewed, further supporting promotion of nutrition, food security and active living, among other benefits.
Also, Evers is pleased to announce the Strides for Obesity Walk, a community fundraiser, returns in 2025 after a few years’ absence. This year, Evers is all about raising the profile of a chronic disease, which impacts one-third of Nova Scotians, and requires more care and treatment access.
“We put so much onus on patients who have this disease,” Evers said. “I always say, ‘There’s no other disease that’s as visible as this and there’s not one that comes with the blame and shame.’”
She hopes to champion improved and additional mental health and cognitive health therapies to shift that burden.
Some advances cleared a path to change, such as a spike in the number of bariatric surgeons in the province and the establishment of an obesity clinic in Cape Breton. Also, a handful of medications are approved for use in Canada, but obstacles exist in terms of insurance coverage.
Notwithstanding the challenges linked with accessing some of those drugs, obesity continues to be viewed in some medical circles as a lifestyle risk versus a disease for which the patient has little or no control. The eat-less exercise-more mantras still exist, Evers said.
The addition of bariatric beds, for example, in Bridgewater (early 2020s) and in Liverpool (2024), is another positive move, although Evers believes the equipment should be commonplace in every medical unit in the province.
Health Canada has even identified weight bias as relevant to discussions surrounding healthy living, specifically calling it a “stigma and discrimination on the basis of body size and weight,” in 2022. Even before the pandemic – when youth physical activity levels plummeted - obesity levels in the nation were high, Health Canada said, “with one in three children and two out of three adults considered overweight or obese.”
Body Mass Index (BMI), once a widely accepted measurement of weight, does not tell the full story, anymore. It takes conversations with the patient to truly learn how obesity affects their lives, Evers added. “You can be living with weight and be healthy and have a high BMI.”
A three-year-old Health Canada briefing document titled “Healthy Living and Obesity” mentions factors contributing to individual body sizes and weights. “Some factors are somewhat within an individual’s control,” such as diet and exercise, “though many are not.”
Obesity, said Evers, “needs to be appreciated, respected and treated as a chronic disease and, historically, it hasn’t been.”
She hopes the new attention to the issue yields reductions in wait times for bariatric patients needing surgeries, thereby keeping up with the couple hundred annual referrals the Halifax Bariatric Surgery Clinic receives.
Photo of Kara Evers.
