Wednesday 24 February 2021

BMI Blunder

It's amazing that the UK NHS apparently trusts people to calculate their own Body Mass Index (BMI). This somewhat crude measure is advertised as being useful to determine "if you're a healthy weight". The BMI calculation is quite easy. You divide your weight, in kilograms, by the square of your height, in metres. It seems, however, that the NHS sometimes has difficulties itself with the metric. A healthy 32 year old, 6 feet 2 inch ('old metric) journalist was contacted by his General Practitioner to go for an urgent Covid-19 vaccination (https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/feb/18/6cm-tall-man-offered-covid-vaccine-after-nhs-blunder-liam-thorp). When the journalist telephoned to ask why he had such a high priority, he was told they had his height down as 6.2cm. This generated a BMI approaching 28,000 (anything above 25 is overweight). Being overweight is an established risk factor in a Covid-19 infection but I don't understand how they expected him to travel for his injection. A BMI of 28,000 would require a low-loader!

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