The Lifestyle Medicine Core Competencies Online Program is presented in two parts covering basic and advanced material:
- Part 1, Basic Training Curriculum: Covers the 15 core competencies of lifestyle medicine endorsed by ACLM and ACPM, which was published in JAMA.
- Part 2, Advanced Training Curriculum: In-depth study of the competencies, guidance on how to employ them in a lifestyle medicine-oriented practice, and approaches to facilitating behavior change interventions.
Part 1: Basic Training Curriculum
Leadership
- Promote healthy behaviors as foundational to medical care, disease prevention, and health promotion.
- Seek to practice healthy behaviors and create environments that support healthy behaviors in school, at work, and at home.
- Demonstrate knowledge of the evidence that specific lifestyle changes can have a positive effect on patients’ health outcomes.
- Describe ways that physician engagement with patients and families can have a positive effect on patients’ health behaviors.
Assessment Skills
- Assess the social, psychological, and biological predispositions of patients’ behaviors and the resulting health outcomes.
- Assess patient and family readiness, willingness, and ability to make health behavior changes.
- Perform a history and physical examination specific to lifestyle-related health status, including lifestyle "vital signs” such as tobacco use, alcohol consumption, diet, physical activity, body mass index, stress level, sleep, and emotional well-being.
- Based on this assessment, obtain and interpret appropriate tests to screen, diagnose, and monitor lifestyle-related diseases.
Management Skills
- Use nationally recognized practice guidelines (such as those for hypertension and smoking cessation) to assist patients in self-managing their health behaviors and lifestyles.
- Establish effective relationships with patients and their families to affect and sustain behavioral change using evidence-based counseling methods, tools and follow-up.
- Collaborate with patients and their families to develop evidence-based, achievable, specific, and written action plans such as lifestyle prescriptions.
- Help patients manage and sustain healthy lifestyle practices, and refer patients to other health care professionals as needed for lifestyle-related conditions.
Use of Office and Community Support
- Have the ability to practice as an interdisciplinary team of health care professionals and support a team approach.
- Develop and apply office systems and practices to support lifestyle medical care including decision-support technology.
- Measure processes and outcomes to improve the quality of lifestyle interventions in individuals and groups of patients.
- Use appropriate community referral resources that support the implementation of healthy lifestyles.
Behavior Change Introduction Topics
- Gain introductory knowledge of facilitating behavior change interventions in these and other lifestyle medicine areas. These will be covered in-depth in the second part of the program.
Part 2: Advanced Training Curriculum
The second part of the program provides a more in-depth study of the above competencies and focuses on facilitating behavior change interventions in the following lifestyle medicine domains:- Nutrition
- Physical Activity
- Sleep Health
- Emotional Wellness
- Mindfulness
- Tobacco Cessation
- Alcohol use