Advancing a new approach to helping Canadians pursue healthier lives.
CHANGE BC is changing the health of our communities.
We need an intervention.
As our population ages, countless studies show that growing numbers are increasingly leading unhealthy lives. Whether our busy lifestyles require more time sitting in cars and in front of screens, or a lack of knowledge about how to purchase and prepare healthy foods, the situation is dire. Diabetes. Obesity. Cardiovascular disease. These types of chronic and deadly conditions are on the rise, costing billions in health care dollars and subjecting individuals and their families to untold suffering. Most importantly, it’s costing lives.
Underlying it all is a hidden but largely preventable epidemic: metabolic syndrome.
CHANGE British Columbia (CHANGE BC) is a team of leading health experts from across the province — practicing family physicians, medical researchers, academics, dietetic specialists and kinesiologists — who are determined to find a better way. A pilot of this work completed in the Pacific Northwest in 2019 demonstrated the CHANGE BC program can reverse and reduce metabolic syndrome in many patients. However, this pilot also highlighted the need for expansion across communities to reach more participants. Additional resources are required to reach more at-risk patients that cannot access the program in person.
In the past ten years the number of individuals in BC who have been diagnosed with diabetes has increased by 74%. Over the next decade it is projected to increase by another 44%. Metabolic syndrome and type two diabetes rates in the Pacific Northwest are some of the highest in the province.
There are no drugs that can reverse metabolic syndrome. Canadians manage symptoms of heart attacks, strokes and diabetes with prescriptive drugs, however they are only managing symptoms and not tackling the root cause of these issues. The CHANGE Program transitions patients from managing acute care symptoms towards making preventative care long term life style changes.
CHANGE BC is the provincial team finding innovative and effective ways to implement the CHANGE Program across BC, in collaboration with provincial partners and other regional CHANGE teams.
Background
The CHANGE Program was the vision of Dr. Khursheed Jeejeebhoy, an internationally recognized Gastroenterologist and expert in the interaction between nutrition and disease. For more than 20 years, he was troubled watching a health system fail to apply mounting evidence that diet-exercise could prevent and reverse metabolic syndrome. Practical tools just weren’t available for family physicians or patients to apply nutrition and exercise in a scientifically effective way to prevent disease.
Dr. Jeejeebhoy envisioned giving family physicians a new approach, with practical tools and knowledge to successfully implement a proven diet-exercise program in busy family practices. What Dr. Jeejeebhoy recognized is that many people have a genetic trait called insulin resistance that induces metabolic syndrome — changes invisible to the patient but detectable by a family doctor that increase the risk of diabetes, heart disease and stroke. For this reason, Dr. Jeejeebhoy reasoned, the family doctor is the person most able to convey the health risk to patients and help modify their lifestyles.
Ken Flood, a successful business person and serial entrepreneur, saw the opportunity and more importantly, the impact this could have on improving the health of Canadians. Mr. Flood started building the team that would make this vision a reality: a national program available to all Canadians.
The success of the CHANGE Program’s feasibility study led to the expansion of the program into over 60 clinics across Canada, with over 200 doctors and their interdisciplinary teams, trained. Given the right tools and resources, family practices can recruit patients to an evidence-based diet-exercise intervention and a majority of them will enthusiastically adhere to the program. Most significantly, CHANGE has successfully reduced metabolic syndrome and the risks of future cardiovascular events in a high percentage of patients.
These impressive results are garnering the attention of family medicine clinics across the country and the focus in now on implementation in entire communities, where the CHANGE Program will be accessible to thousands of Canadians.
Dr. K. Jeejeebhoy, Founder
K. Flood, Founder