About HOPE

Physician-led education for the future of obesity care.

HOPE (HealthEd in Obesity for Physician Empowerment) is a Canadian physician-led medical education company dedicated to advancing evidence-based obesity care. It is led by practicing clinicians and academic obesity specialists, and its editorial judgment is independent of pharmaceutical, device, and commercial wellness interests.

Why HOPE

The science has advanced faster than the conversation.

Obesity is one of the few areas in modern medicine where effective treatment has outpaced the ability of the clinical encounter to deliver it. The evidence base has matured, the disease framing is established, and the guidelines are written. And yet primary care obesity treatment lags far behind what the evidence supports.

The barrier sits inside the consultation itself, loaded with stigma, internalized bias, and decades of commercial misinformation that neither patient nor physician asked to inherit. HOPE was founded to repair that consultation through independent, patient-anchored education, and to mentor the next generation of obesity educators who will keep doing that work across specialties and across borders.

Education philosophy

Built around the encounter, not the slide deck.

Patient-anchored

Every program is designed around what the patient experiences in the room, rather than around what is easiest to lecture about. Patient voice sits at the governance level, not as advisory input.

Behaviour change in the clinician

Designed to change what happens next. Knowledge alone doesn't change practice; applying it does. Every HOPE program is built around what the physician will do differently in the next patient encounter, not what they'll remember from the slides.

Measured against practice change

Programs are designed to report against indicators that matter, like treatment initiation, shared-decision uptake, and knowledge retention at 60 days, rather than attendance or credits earned.

Board of Directors

Led by the clinicians who define the field.

HOPE's board brings together leading Canadian clinicians and researchers in obesity medicine, alongside expertise in medical education, health systems, and patient engagement.

Dr. David Macklin

MD, CCFP, GP-Psych

Founding physician of HOPE. Long-standing leader in Canadian obesity medicine and primary care education. Author and instructional designer of the conversation curriculum that anchors HOPE's flagship program.

Dr. Megha Poddar

MD, FRCPC, ABOM Diplomate

Founding physician of HOPE. Endocrinologist and obesity medicine specialist, internationally recognized in obesity pharmacotherapy education and clinician training.

Dr. Arya Sharma

MD, PhD, FRCPC

Founding physician of HOPE. Architect of the Edmonton Obesity Staging System and one of the most influential voices in framing obesity as a chronic disease. Author of the Canadian Adult Obesity Clinical Practice Guidelines.

Dr. Marie-Philippe Morin

Clinician-scientist

French-Canadian clinician-scientist anchoring HOPE's bilingual and francophone reach. Ensures content lands in language and clinical culture across Quebec and bilingual practice settings.

Ms. Michelle McMillan

Patient advocate

Patient advocate living with obesity. Holds a director-level vote, serving as a structural check on whether HOPE's programs do what they claim, not as advisory input. A program built to repair the clinician–patient encounter cannot be governed without the patient in the room.

Expert advisory panel

Specialists across nephrology, neurology, sleep medicine, hepatology, and cardiology advise HOPE on programs that sit at the intersection of obesity and their fields.

Independence

How HOPE stays editorially independent.

HOPE's clinical leadership holds full responsibility for content, educational design, and faculty selection. Industry funding for independent education comes as unrestricted educational grants, pooled across multiple funders, with transparent disclosure of all relationships.

Every HOPE program undergoes review by an external Editorial Independence Committee prior to launch. No funder has editorial input, and no funder may condition support on the inclusion or exclusion of clinical content. All pharmacotherapy education is delivered at the class level by mechanism of action; individual products are not referenced in the curriculum.

These standards reflect HOPE's foundational commitment to credibility and trust in the healthcare community, and they are the framework within which grant partnerships are structured.

Work with us.

HOPE accepts funding through unrestricted multi-funder grants and collaborates with academic partners, specialty societies, and patient organizations on programs that meet our independence and impact standards.

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