“Healthy doctors make healthy patients”, stated Dr Callum Leese from Aberfeldy Medical Practice, Aberfeldy – who is also a lecturer at the University of Dundee for the Scottish Clinical Research Excellence Development Scheme (SCREDS) – during a workshop at the Royal College of General Practitioners (RCGP) annual meeting, aimed to encourage GPs to embed lifestyle medicine into primary care through collaborative action.
Dr Leese discussed the benefits of lifestyle medicine services in addressing lifestyle-related diseases, reducing their contribution towards the prevalence of chronic conditions, and helping prevent premature mortality.
Leese is leading a project to make Aberfeldy the healthiest town in Scotland by promoting physical activities, and a recent food festival to encourage healthy cooking and eating. “There’s loads of things that can be done to try and inspire change,” he said. “The research is fairly unequivocal in that healthy doctors make healthy patients,” Leese asserted. “The most important thing we can do is target our doctors and our nurses and make them advocates for what we want to see with our patients.”
Leese also stressed the importance of short but effective discussions between GPs and patients and gave examples of online resources to recommend to patients, such as Moving Medicine, which aims to help healthcare professionals integrate physical activity into routine clinical conversations, or the RCGP toolkit (the Physical Activity Hub). ”
Leese also cited the PCN Lifestyle Clinics, originating from the Leamington Primary Care Network (PCN), as an example of successful lifestyle medicine integration to help address the needs of people living with chronic conditions. These weekly group-based sessions are run by a GP, a health and wellbeing coach, a dietitian, and a psychiatrist. Together, they cover four aspects of lifestyle and health comprising individual challenges, how community influences behaviour and vice versa, food and nutrition, and physical activity for health and wellbeing.
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