Dr Alex Craven

This session tackles one of the more uncomfortable conversations in modern medicine, the growing tension between commercial interests and genuine patient outcomes in obesity treatment. Drawing on comparisons across the healthcare landscape, it asks whether profit and patient-centred care can truly coexist, and what it would take to get there.

This panel examines patient selection, surgical decision-making, and operative outcomes in metabolic surgery - exploring how the rise of GLP-1 and dual/triple agonist therapies is reshaping surgical indications and perioperative practice across public and private settings.

Key Takeaways:

• How advances in bariatric and metabolic surgical technique including procedure selection, revisional surgery, and optimising perioperative pathways are driving improved long-term outcomes beyond weight loss alone.

• Where GLP-1 and dual/triple agonist therapies sit in the surgical pathway: as a bridge to surgery, an alternative, or a post-operative adjunct and how surgeons should be responding to the evidence.

• How clinical practice across public and private settings diverges on surgical indications, and what standardisation of patient selection criteria could look like in 2025 and beyond.