Pioneering health professionals

Become a Master of Lifestyle Medicine

The newest course at Avondale builds on our reputation as one of Australia’s premier providers of lifestyle medicine education.

The Master of Lifestyle Medicine begins next year. It adds a four-unit research emphasis to the exisiting Graduate Diploma in Lifestyle Medicine, which is itself an extension of the Graduate Certificate in Lifestyle Medicine.

The course “will not only further equip students from the South Pacific but also attract a wider international cohort because it’s one of the few master’s-level degrees offered anywhere in the world,” says Lifestyle Medicine and Health Research Centre Director Associate Professor Darren Morton. “And it’s built from the ground up around the principles and tenets of lifestyle medicine, not just with some lifestyle medicine units added on.”

Avondale is the longest-serving provider of postgraduate lifestyle medicine education in Australia—it first offered the Graduate Diploma in 2015. It’s also developed a strong link with the Australasian Society of Lifestyle Medicine, which offers a pathway to fellowship for students who complete the courses.

The society’s Executive Director, Stephen Penman, thanks leaders at Avondale for “recognising and endorsing” the need for investing in postgraduate lifestyle medicine education. He expects a significant body of research to emerge from the master’s degree. This will help address the need for “lifestyle intervention and counselling at the coalface of clinical practice.”

Dean (Research) Associate Professor Peter Kilgour and the Academic Board he chairs have accredited the degree for five years. “We have had some sector leading outcomes across our fields of education this year,” he writes. The addition of the degree to the suite of lifestyle medicine courses “is a great example of this.”