Transforming healthcare and levelling health inequalities through lifestyle medicine
BSLM is a community of healthcare professionals and patients, committed to a new approach to healthcare, based on the emerging discipline of lifestyle medicine.
The BSLM is an independent charity set up to promote the role of lifestyle medicine in improving people’s health and wellbeing. We empower healthcare professionals to support patients to prevent, manage and even reverse many chronic conditions through education and connection to our like-minded community.
Lifestyle Medicine is evidence-based, clinical care that supports behaviour change through person-centred techniques to improve mental wellbeing, social connection, healthy eating, physical activity, sleep and minimisation of harmful substances and behaviours.
It acknowledges the need for action on socio-economic determinants of health, provides education around the 6 key pillars as well proven techniques to sustain lifestyle changes.
We now have more than 3000 members focusing on multi-disciplinary teams including primary and secondary care clinicians, allied and public health professionals, scientists, educators, researchers and patients.
Ensuring lifestyle medicine education gets to those that need it the most is critical, but education alone is not enough to create sustainable lifestyle changes. There are various skills that have proven to be successful in supporting patients in this regard.
Lifestyle medicine calls for a move away from the traditional doctor-patient relationship where the clinician is the expert information provider. This is needed because we now know that giving simple lifestyle advice such as “eat less and move more” is often ineffective1 2
To be effective in supporting lifestyle change, lifestyle medicine uses knowledge of behavioural science to work with patients. This way we can work with people and their values to support problem solving and equip them with skills to make the changes they want to make. Some of these techniques have been shown to be at least 80% more effective in supporting behaviour change than traditional advice giving 3
Our members include primary and secondary care clinicians, allied and public health professionals, scientists, educators, researchers and patients.
We’re united by a shared commitment to lifestyle medicine, as an effective, evidence-informed approach to preventing, managing and treating lifestyle-related chronic conditions.
We want to reframe healthcare to focus on the lifestyle factors which are the root cause of most chronic illnesses. We support positive behaviour change and improved public health education.
We also believe change is needed at the societal level – to address the ‘upstream’ causes of chronic, lifestyle-related disease such as deprivation, health inequality, social isolation and a lack of hope.
We are an independent, charitable organisation with no religious or political affiliations.
All our work is driven by science and informed by evidence.
The Croatian Lifestyle Medicine Association is organizing a three-day conference titled “Craft, Science, and Art of Lifestyle Medicine”, which will take place at the Medical School, University of Split, from April 11–13, 2025.
Available to BSLM Members in our monthly series, register for the next upcoming webinar, bringing in two new speakers exploring the evidence-based world with lifestyle medicine