As with society, many healthcare providers hold strong negative attitudes & stereotypes about people with obesity.

These attitudes have an impact on quality of healthcare & health outcomes provided to patients with obesity,as well as perceptions & expectations of these patients.

Everyone has the right to primary care, and the quality of care shouldn’t be influenced or informed by how a person looks.

Stigmatizing how people look has an effect on how they are perceived by society, as well as how they view themselves and how others view them.

Obesity stigma has the potential and ability to affect the healthcare process and impede on the provision of quality and equitable healthcare received by obese patients.

The prejudice that healthcare providers hold about obese people and obese patients can make their obese patients feel disrespected, dislikes and unwelcome.

The negative attitudes by providers to wards obese patients are called ‘Enacted Stigma’.

The negative attitudes towards obese people are similar to those held towards other people of minorities, however, and quite telling, people are comfortable with explicitly expressing their bias against obese people than they are other characteristics.