DOZENS of fire personnel and a number of vehicles spent more than four hours getting an obese person out of their home.

That is according to data from the Home Office on fire statistics which catalogues the number of “non-fire bariatric assistance” incidents.

The East Sussex incident in December 2019 saw “20-29 fire personnel” use between “seven and nine vehicles” to help move the overweight person.

It was one of 86 cases between 2019-2020 in which Sussex’s fire services were called-in to help police and ambulance crews move obese people.

In some cases, firefighters will also have to rescue obese people who are trapped and unable to move.

Of the incidents in the period 48 happened in West Sussex and 38 happened in East Sussex.

That is an increase on the previous year, which saw the services deal with 18 and 33 incidents respectively.

West Sussex’s total was one of the highest in the country last year, ranking 8th of 41 services across England.

 

Made with Flourish

A bariatric person is “one who is overweight or ‘plus size’, the Home Office said.

Tam Fry, chairman of the National Obesity Forum, told The Sun: "The escalating number of people having to be winched from their bedrooms to undergo weight loss surgery in hospital is testimony to three decades of Whitehall's completely inadequate measures to tackle obesity.

“Successive governments have dithered since the 1990s to take the bold moves needed in the misplaced hope that the epidemic, dubbed a 'timebomb' by 2003, would never go off.

“It did. The UK is now paying £24bn a year in cleaning up the mess which, in the majority of cases, could have been avoided.

“We are not winning the war on obesity and never will until government gets really serious about the issue."

About one in three adults in the UK are now obese, which defined as having a Body Mass Index (BMI) of at least 30.