Scale up your practice with a free Online Lifestyle Medicine course

Lifestyle Medicine is a medical specialty within conventional Western Medicine that uses therapeutic lifestyle interventions as a primary modality to treat chronic conditions. 

As described in the 2010 position paper1, there is a need for a set of core competencies for physicians that include specific knowledge, assessment and management skills. These core competencies includes series of evidence-based interventions in six main domains: 

  1. Physical activity
  2. Healthy and balanced nutrition and obesity treatment
  3. Avoidance of risky substances 
  4. Stress management
  5. Healthy sleep
  6. Positive social connections 

Brief interventions are recognized by WHO as an effective measure to help people quit tobacco, reduce or stop alcohol use and increase physical activity. They can also help to achieve and maintain healthy eating behaviors and manage weight for those living with overweight and obesity

Cost–effectiveness analysis suggests it is worth investing in implementing and scaling-up these interventions to reduce the overall burden of disease from NCDs2.

To scale up your knowledge and skills to improve your competencies to deliver lifestyle medicine in your practice, we offer a Free Online Lifestyle Medicine course. This Lifestyle Medicine introductory course provides a foundation of theoretical and practical knowledge and skills, as well as an opportunity to plan strategies and practice techniques for assisting patients with positive health behavior changes.
All parts of this training are free, including registration, learning, testing, and a certificate of completion. This course is intended for primary care physicians, nurses, and allied health professionals in training and in practice. 

For Information and enrolling to the course at https://nextgenu.org/ 

please click here


 

We, WONCA Europe Lifestyle Medicine SIG, invite WONCA members who are interested or involved in lifestyle medicine to join us and be part of this very important movement.

Together we can promote lifestyle medicine throughout the family physician's network in Europe.

For more information, please contact Lilach.Malatskey@gmail.com

 

  1. Physician competencies for prescribing lifestyle medicine; Liana Lianov, Mark Johnson. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20628134/ 

  2. Integrated brief interventions for noncommunicable disease risk factors in primary care: the manual: BRIEF project. https://apps.who.int/iris/handle/10665/364437