Children's Clinic: UCSF WATCH Program

(Weight Assessment for Teen and Child Health)

Our Mission is to alleviate the burden of obesity on the pediatric population through an interdisciplinary approach to clinical care, research, and training.

Pediatric obesity has become epidemic in all age, race, and demographic groups. The cause for this epidemic is thought to be the interaction of genetic predisposition with our current "toxic" environment of over-nutrition and inactivity. In light of the significant incidence of co-morbidities associated with obesity, the WATCH Program has been constituted as a multi-disciplinary program focused on improving the problem of childhood obesity in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Our Goals and Objectives:

To serve the San Francisco Bay Area pediatric population regarding obesity care.
To meet the burgeoning clinical need of the community by providing state-of-the-art service to all obese children.
To increase the capacity to respond to severe co-morbidity, in order to provide increased in-patient services, e.g. pulmonary, cardiology, surgery.
To improve patient service, convenience, and compliance by consolidating multiple provider visits, into an interdisciplinary practice.
To create a venue for clinical research in pediatric obesity.
To achieve "critical mass" for faculty in pediatric obesity, in order to obtain and scope clinical research grants of increasing complexity.
To protocolize patient care, so that clinical research data can be collected easily and analyzed.
To establish a research population database with demographic, metabolic, and genetic overlays, to serve as a nidus for research efforts.
To promote teaching and dissemination of knowledge.
To maintain our monthly Pediatric Obesity seminar series (WATCH Clinic lectures are held on the last Friday of each month).
To provide an interdisciplinary venue for teaching of students, house staff, and fellows, regarding the diagnosis and treatment of pediatric obesity.

Please click here to learn more: UCSF Children's Hospital Obesity Services