Avondale courses now count towards lifestyle medicine fellowship
Units from Avondale’s postgraduate courses in lifestyle medicine will now help health sector employees in Australasia earn a new professional fellowship.
The fellowship is an initiative of the Australasian Society of Lifestyle Medicine. Students completing the Graduate Certificate or the Graduate Diploma in Lifestyle Medicine via distance through Avondale College of Higher Education can earn up to two-thirds of the points towards it.
“If postgraduate units in lifestyle medicine didn’t already exist, establishing a fellowship program would be a much bigger task,” says the society’s Executive Director Stephen Penman. “So it’s a real advantage to the society and to our fellowship candidates to enrol immediately in an established tertiary program.”
Penman and the convenor for the lifestyle medicine courses at Avondale, Dr Darren Morton, began formalising the arrangement as they collaborated on a one-night symposium exploring the future of healthcare and the contribution of lifestyle as medicine. The symposium, called Live More!, featured a keynote presentation from Australia’s Chief Medical Officer Professor Chris Baggoley and from the society’s Vice-President Professor Garry Egger, an advisor to the World Health Organisation in chronic disease prevention.
“Live More! strengthened our relationship,” says Morton, who also presented a keynote at the symposium. “As Stephen and I talked, we realised what Avondale could bring to the society and what the society could bring to Avondale.”
The answer to the first: Avondale’s courses are tailored to lifestyle medicine. “They’re unique because they’re built from the ground up rather than incorporated into an existing degree,” says Morton.
And the second? “An affiliation with a professional society builds awareness of our courses and credibility for our Lifestyle Research Centre.”
The Lifestyle Research Centre at Avondale presented Live More! with the society and three other entities.
The Australasian Society of Lifestyle Medicine is a multidisciplinary society of academics, educators, doctors, allied health practitioners and public health professionals helping Australians and New Zealanders manage, treat and prevent lifestyle-related diseases. Its fellowship is also multidisciplinary, which means it can be completed from an academic, clinical, educational or professional perspective. “It essentially brings lifestyle medicine to the attention of the medical community and makes a strong statement about the relevance of the discipline to clinical practice,” says Penman.
Lifestyle medicine emerged as a discipline around 2004, largely in response to the epidemic of chronic and lifestyle-related diseases. “It’s much more than health behaviour,” writes Penman in an announcement about the fellowship. “It sits at the intersection of medicine and public health, addressing not only clinical practice and health policy, but behavioural, social, psychological, environmental and socioeconomic factors impacting on health and wellbeing.
“Rewind 10 years and remember the numerous government reports . . . calling for an urgent paradigm shift towards prevention, early intervention, self-management and a new focus on wellness in the face of an unsustainable health system. Lifestyle medicine epitomises that new paradigm.”
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