Health Screening (Q1)

There are four health screening tests that you need to be aware of:

• Waist to hip ratio

• Heart rate

• Blood pressure

• Body mass index

For each of the four tests you need to be able to:

• interpret the value

• tell me what category this puts the value in

• tell me what normal is for the client (considering age and sex)

• consider whether this is having a positive or negative impact on health

Example

BMI value - 27 kg/m squared

This client's body mass index is 27, meaning the client is overweight. The overweight category includes values from 25 to 29.9. A normal BMI would sit in the range of 18.5 to 24.9.

Having a higher BMI could have a negative impact on the health and wellbeing of the client. However, BMI does not take into account ethnicity or body composition. The client's BMI could be high as a result of high muscle mass (which would be positive) or high fat mass (which would be negative). We can use BMI in conjunction with waist to hip ratios to check for abdominal obesity, which would indicate the weight is being carried in a negative way, or a BIA result to get a body fat percentage/ muscle percentage to help us to draw conclusions.

BMI calculator - https://www.nhs.uk/live-well/healthy-weight/bmi-calculator/

Waist to hip ratio calculator - https://www.diabetes.co.uk/waist-to-hip-ratio-calculator.html