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.
Lifestyle Medicine is evidence-based, clinical care that supports behaviour change through person-centered techniques to improve mental wellbeing, social connection, healthy eating, physical activity, sleep and minimisation of harmful substances and behaviours.
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 Experience Led Care Programme has joined forces with Dr Rupa Joshi – one of the UK’s most experienced group clinic practitioners – to offer a free masterclass to help you convert your passive interest into action.
This years Kernow conference title is “One Health” which we hope encourages us all to think about the overlapping themes of people and planet, equal rights to health for all people and caring for ourselves as well as for our patients and clients.
This study day aims to showcase the way our many Members are finding ways of ensuring lifestyle medicine gets to some of those underserved communities. This webinar is free to attend and open to all from Clinicians and practitioners working with these areas to patients interested in using lifestyle medicine to manage and prevent chronic illness. All those registered will receive the recording post event.
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
Lifestyle Medicine Podcasts
Explore the different Lifestyle Medicine podcasts available through BSLM