COMMUNITY CASE STUDY article
Front. Psychiatry
Sec. Public Mental Health
This article is part of the Research TopicThe Mental Health Impact of Weight StigmaView all 9 articles
Chutes and ladders: Collaborating across disciplines to improve mental and physical healthcare for larger-bodied people
Provisionally accepted
Chioma Ngumezi Tomlinson1,2*
Mara M Hampson1,2
Ankita Patel1,2Jacqueline Liu3Lisa Du Breuil2Janet Rich-Edwards1,2- 1Brigham and Women's Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, United States
- 2Mass General Brigham, Somerville, Massachusetts, United States
- 3Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts, United States
Select one of your emails
You have multiple emails registered with Frontiers:
Notify me on publication
Please enter your email address:
If you already have an account, please login
You don't have a Frontiers account ? You can register here
Weight stigma in healthcare contributes to poor patient outcomes, emotional harm, and avoidance of care. Healthcare systems are often perceived as hostile environments for many larger-bodied people who often report feeling judged, dismissed or denied appropriate treatment. Despite growing awareness, most medical educational programs and healthcare systems do not address weight bias directly. Persuading clinicians and staff to disrupt the traditional medical paradigm and instead adopt a size-inclusive perspective requires educational materials that push the envelope without pushing learners off a cliff. This paper describes the development of a weight-inclusive e-course designed to raise awareness of the impact of anti-fat bias in medicine. Grounded in the philosophical frameworks of Health at Every Size™ (HAES™) and Trauma-Informed Care (TIC), the course was co-created by a multidisciplinary team including clinicians, educators, activists, and individuals with lived experience. The collaborative process emphasized shared leadership, inclusive design, and emotional safety. We detail the course's development over six months of weekly virtual meetings, including content creation, conflict resolution, accessibility planning, and evaluation design. The course includes three tracks tailored to clinicians, staff, and patients, and integrates practical tools for weight-neutral care. Lessons learned from this process offer a replicable model for inclusive curriculum design. Our aim is for learners to engage deeply with this work in order to fully reap the benefits for themselves and their patients. Institutions seeking to address weight stigma can use this framework to foster respectful, equitable care for people in all bodies.
Keywords: weight bias and stigma, Trauma Informed Approach, Health at Every Size (HAES), multidiscipliary team, Primary Care, Primary care / general practice < Setting of care
Received: 08 Mar 2025; Accepted: 23 Oct 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Tomlinson, Hampson, Patel, Liu, Du Breuil and Rich-Edwards. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Chioma Ngumezi Tomlinson, cntomlinson@bwh.harvard.edu
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.