Behind the scenes at the ASLM strategic planning meeting and exciting funding news!
What does a full day strategic planning meeting of the ASLM board and management team look like? Certainly, the table gets messy! Pictured are 9 board members and 2 senior staff. Not pictured are the remaining 3 board members (2 attending by Zoom and myself as camera person).
Three and a half years after the re-launch of the Australasian Lifestyle Medicine Association (ALMA) as the Australasian Society of Lifestyle Medicine (ASLM), there’s plenty to be excited about. During that time, the Society has grown exponentially, nearly doubling in scale and reach each year. Given that we have done this without government or philanthropic funding, we can justifiably feel proud of our efforts.
However, there is much to be done, and strategic direction and planning remains central to the growth of the organisation. The last time the whole board and management team met for a full day meeting like this was in February 2016. Each time we meet, we aim to look 5-10 years into the future. This time we again reviewed our strengths and weaknesses, opportunities and risks, and then reviewed the needs/gaps and challenges for Lifestyle Medicine to become widely known and predominantly practised in Australia and New Zealand. Each of the identified needs were developed into an ‘initiative’ for which we could then explore funding options.
In breaking (and very exciting) news, I am delighted to announce that some of those initiatives have just been funded by a significant philanthropic grant – ASLM’s first.
We expect to announce this formally soon but in the meantime, I wanted to share what you can expect from ASLM as a result of the funding over the next 2 1/2 years.
You will see us:
- Develop a national Lifestyle Medicine student body and launch an initiative to advocate for Lifestyle Medicine to be included in medicine and allied health courses
- Develop substantial online learning in Lifestyle Medicine presented as practical professional development modules
- Publish a series of position statements and therapeutic guidelines on key areas of Lifestyle Medicine for medical practitioners and other health professionals
- Develop a comprehensive ‘tool-kit’ of Lifestyle Medicine resources for members which will include patient history, investigation, how-to-treat, management, and patient handouts, with a digital platform for integration and ongoing research
- Run significant awareness and advocacy campaigns, for example on Lifestyle Medicine approaches for common mental health concerns and for reversing type 2 diabetes.
For example, given that the research demonstrates that reversing type 2 diabetes is not only possible in early stage diabetes, but realistically achievable in many cases, why is this not the target of every diagnosis? There’s lots of reasons of course why this is difficult given a profound lack of training and resources in this area, but none of them are ‘good’ reasons.
Likewise with mental health. Prof Felice Jacka and colleagues around the world have been repeatedly demonstrating for years now that diet and nutrition should be first line treatment in mental health presentations, and the same goes for physical activity which has consistently been shown to be as effective as pharmaceuticals for depression (with no downside). Of course there are practical challenges in achieving this, but why is this not the standard of care we aspire to?
There’s more on our wish list, but it’s exciting that we will now be able to commence these initiatives. To coincide with these initiatives, we will conduct outreach campaigns to each of the health professions to help practitioners engage with Lifestyle Medicine as an accessible and logical approach to practice and to healthcare generally.
Lifestyle Medicine is both multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary. We believe that it will take everyone working together at all levels of the system from clinical practice through to community programs and health policy to make a dent on the chronic and lifestyle-related disease problem, especially when it is being driven so strongly by our society and environment.
Other things you can expect to see in the very near future include:
- ‘Roundtable’ membership for organisations and companies
- Searchable practitioner profiles and member community on our website
- Expanded social media presence with Lifestyle Medicine Facebook groups
- A new Lifestyle Medicine speakers bureau to make finding a speaker easy
- A number of scholarships and awards to recognise effort and excellence in Lifestyle Medicine
It’s exciting times for Lifestyle Medicine. It’s beginning to really get noticed and is taking off around the world too. There are now societies established in at least 15 countries, with many more countries in various stages of starting up. Lifestyle Medicine is clearly a movement as much as it is a discipline. A movement to bring about change in health and healthcare. Which is where you, our members, supporters and stakeholders, come in. Your support enables us to fulfil our mission of ‘advancing health’ by improving the prevention, management and treatment of chronic and lifestyle-related conditions.
But it goes quite a bit further than that in my view. ASLM is a values-driven organisation. We believe in collaboration, inclusion, health equity, social justice, and environmental sustainability. In short, people and purpose before profit. I suspect this alignment of our values with your values is at the core of our growth – in that we often hear our members say that they have ‘found their home’ in ASLM.
ASLM is currently the second oldest and probably the second largest Lifestyle Medicine society in the world, after the American College of Lifestyle Medicine. As such we have an important role to play, both at home in Australia and New Zealand, and in shaping the movement internationally.
For example, the two most significant things we did in the last three years were; launching a world-first framework for Fellowship in Lifestyle Medicine, which I believe is the first fully multidisciplinary fellowship (ASLM now has 53 Fellows); and assisting in the development of the international Board Certification exam – which we held in Sydney in November 2017 and then in Brisbane in August 2018. There are now about 62 health professionals Certified in Lifestyle Medicine.
And of course, the big format conferences, Lifestyle Medicine 2016, 2017, and 2018 have also been hugely popular. We are now in the process of launching Lifestyle Medicine in New Zealand and hope to see you at Lifestyle Medicine 2019 in Auckland in June!
A big thank you to our members and supporters. We couldn’t do it without you!
