Avondale launches Lifestyle Research Centre
Sherona Pillidge
Bachelor of Arts student
Avondale College of Higher Education
Cooranbong, New South Wales, Australia
A research centre established by Avondale College of Higher Education is helping measure the effectiveness of a health improvement program while encouraging collaboration among academics.
The Lifestyle Research Centre is providing staff members and postgraduate students an opportunity to primarily study the Seventh-day Adventist Church’s Complete Health Improvement Program (CHIP). One of the centre’s lead researchers, Dr Darren Morton, a senior lecturer in health and exercise science in the School of Education, describes CHIP as “arguably the most well-published lifestyle intervention in the research literature.”
That literature is growing—the centre has had publication success already. Melbourne-based epidemiologist Dr Lillian Kent, a research associate/fellow for the centre, is the lead author of two published papers—one in what was the British Medical Journal. Darren is lead author of another in the New Zealand Medical Journal.
The centre encourages collaboration among staff members and students in the Faculties of Arts and Theology, Education, Business and Science and Nursing and Health. “It provides an opportunity for our academics, no matter which faculty they’re from, to participate in research,” says vice-president (research) Professor Tony Williams.
He hopes the centre becomes a leader in the study of lifestyle and how it relates to health and wellbeing. This will provide a focus for Avondale’s move into multi-disciplinary research, which, according to Darren, will help on the college’s journey to self-accrediting status.
The centre will have a governing committee that includes representatives from each faculty, from the church and its Australasian Research Institute and from Sanitarium Health and Wellbeing.
The church in the South Pacific has relaunched CHIP, developed in the United States by Dr Hans Diehl’s Lifestyle Medicine Institute, under the leadership and management of Sanitarium Health and Wellbeing. Says Cathy McDonald, general manager of Sanitarium’s Health and Wellbeing Services: “CHIP has been setting the church up to be a centre of influence in the community, bringing great results and bringing the church’s health message to life.”—with Brenton Stacey/Nathan Brown, book editor, Signs Publishing Company