 We're really facing an obesity epidemic with almost two out of three Australian adults overweight or obese and about one in four children and this has a whole range of health consequences such as heart attack, stroke, increased risk of diabetes, arthritis and the need for joint replacements, sleep apnea, so it's reducing quality of life but it's a real burden financially to the health system. At the moment most patients are referred either to a dietitian or other allied health provider for management of obesity but we know that GPs have a really strong and good relationship with a lot of their patients and perhaps this therapeutic relationship between a GP and their patient is a missing link in obesity management. So what we want to do is find ways of measuring why some obesity management programs might work and others don't work so well because at the moment we know that over 50% of people that enroll into obesity programs drop out after a really short amount of time so we want to find tools to measure what it could be that that's missing factor to make people want to keep working towards healthier lifestyles. What this research has done is tried to find a way of measuring that relationship so what we've done is taken a tool from psychology and applied that in our obesity management work and looked at measuring that relationship between a GP and a patient. That tool is particularly fantastic because it doesn't just look at that warm fuzzy feeling that we associate with a therapeutic relationship also looks at collaborative goal setting and whether a patient's happy with a plan that a GP's made towards working towards their goals. Through the research project we helped a number of patients lose you know between five and eight kilos which is a really significant amount of weight and we've continued to use those skills that we learned to support our patients to lose weight since then. All research works a lot better when you have the people that it affects directly involved in both the setting up of the research and the carrying out of the research and having GP's involved and interested in this project was the absolute strength of it. It was easy to recruit GP's for this trial because it's a it's a question they're interested in. They can see that we're trying to work alongside and with general practice and GP's rather than trying to impose something top-down so I think that was the major strength of this trial.