Help shape how Lifestyle Medicine is practised in Australia and New Zealand

A co-design workshop at LM26, Friday 13 November, Hobart

What does Lifestyle Medicine actually look like in practice? What is essential, what is best practice, and what depends on your setting? Right now there is no agreed answer for Australia and New Zealand, and we think the people best placed to write one are the people already doing the work.

On the Friday afternoon of “The Nature of Health: Lifestyle Medicine Pillars in Practice”, ASLM and James Cook University are running a co-design workshop to build the first implementation framework for Lifestyle Medicine in primary care across both countries. This is not a traditional conference workshop. You won’t be sitting back and learning something new. We are asking you to contribute what you already know.

What we're doing

The starting point is the evidence we already have. JCU’s recently published scoping review of Lifestyle Medicine integrated care models, the American College of Lifestyle Medicine consensus statements, and the PRISM implementation framework have been mapped into a working draft.

In small groups, you will review that draft against your own experience, then refine, challenge and expand it. Together we will sort each element into three tiers:

Core: essential to Lifestyle Medicine
Recommended: best practice, but not mandatory
Optional: levers that depend on context

Why it matters

The workshop will produce a JCU–ASLM framework that members can use straight away to guide how they set up and run Lifestyle Medicine in their own practice. It will also become the foundation for a formal Delphi consensus process and, ultimately, published guidelines that can support training, funding and policy advocacy.

Who we need in the room

We want the full breadth of Lifestyle Medicine practice represented: GPs, nurses, allied health and other professions; rural and metropolitan; public and private; Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander and Māori health perspectives; and everything from solo practice to embedded and team-based models. If you practise Lifestyle Medicine in any setting, your experience is exactly what this needs.

The details

When: Friday 13 November, afternoon, two 90-minute sessions
Where: Hotel Grand Chancellor, Hobart, as part of LM26
Facilitators: Dr Emma King, Dr Sam Manger, Dr Ruth Eagles, Anita Swan, Sharon Curtain, Dr Bethany Hough, Dr Clea Alexander, Dr Yohannes Melaku, and Dr Jill Gamberg
Format: highly interactive, small-group work
Before you arrive: a short pre-workshop video (around 17 minutes) covering the background and method, so we can spend our time together on discussion

Places are limited so we can keep the groups small and productive.

Please register your interest by sending an email to info@lifestylemedicine.org.au.