RACGP Healthy Habits

A free digital tool to discuss physical activity and nutrition with patients and monitor their progress

RACGP’s Healthy Habits  is a simple to use digital health tool that enables GPs and their practice teams to encourage patients to achieve healthier lifestyles, through increased physical activity and improved nutrition behaviours. Healthy Habits have been developed by the RACGP in partnership with the Commonwealth Government Department of Health.

  • The Patient Pathways supports clinicians to start conversations about making lifestyle changes, assess a patient’s readiness for change and if suitable, set up and use Healthy Habits to track their lifestyle changes.
  • A mobile app that patients use to set goals and log progress that links up to your Healthy Habits practice
  • Intuitive clinician dashboard to view and monitor a patient’s progress and send one-way messages to offer support and encouragement.
  •  A Resource Hub which includes a directory of information, programs, education and CPD training to further support health professionals and patients achieve behaviour changes in nutrition and physical activity.   

Healthy Habits has been designed by the RACGP in consultation with GPs, Primary Health Care Nurses, practice managers, health consumers and behaviour change experts. It is based on behaviour change theory.

While Healthy Habits can be used by anyone, your patient will most likely benefit from using Healthy Habit if they meet the following criteria:

  • Aged 40 years and over
  • At risk of, or have cardiovascular disease or other chronic conditions
  • Currently leads a sedentary lifestyle
  • At early stages of behaviour change for physical activity and nutrition (contemplation stage) whereby they would benefit from learning more about physical activity and nutrition and being supported to set up and maintain healthier habits.
  • Has a reasonable level of digital literacy.

Being part of the Healthy Habits program will help your practice by:

  • Providing clinicians with useful tools (patient pathways, behaviour change tools, clinician dashboard, resource hub) to strengthen your abilities in motivating behaviour change in unhealthy lifestyle patients
  • Providing clinicians up-to-date and accurate patient data to enable informed conversation and decision-making during consultations 
  • Offering a new and flexible way of delivering healthcare through technology
  • Presenting activities for my GPs and Practice Nurses to maintain best practice in physical activity and nutrition counselling while earning CPD points

Putting it into practice: Implementing Healthy Habits in your practice is a helpful guide to assist practices in their roll-out of Healthy Habits.  The guide takes you through assigning roles and responsibilities to team members, enrolling patients, example workflows and billing, training and education,  and quality improvement activities.

Register your practice

Register now to create an account to access your clinician dashboard
and track your patient’s nutrition and exercise progress.

  Register your practice 

Download promotional material for your practice

Healthy Habits Poster

A collection of posters for you to use electronically or print and display in your practice. 

Download 

Patient brochure

A patient brochure to print off and provide to interested patients.

Download 

RACGP publications and guidelines

Views and attitudes towards physical activity and nutrition counselling in general practice – National survey report 2019 

Download guideline

Smoking, nutrition, alcohol, physical activity (SNAP) guide is designed to assist GPs and practice staff to work with patients on modifiable lifestyle risk factors 

Read guideline

Guidelines for preventive activities in general practice (Red Book) provides comprehensive advice on delivering preventive healthcare in general practice

Read guideline

Putting prevention into practice: Guidelines for the implementation of prevention in the general practice setting (Green Book) provides general practice teams with effective strategies, processes and tools to implement and sustain preventive activities 

Read guideline

FAQs

How much does it cost to get involved with Healthy Habits? 
Healthy Habits is free for everyone.  

I’m a general practitioner (GP), can I sign up for Healthy Habits?
Yes, absolutely, please do! Your practice will need to be verified before you can add patients and invite other practice staff to join. If you are a RACGP member you can verify the practice immediately using your RACGP member login details. Alternatively, if you are not a member the RACGP Healthy Habits team will contact your practice to complete the verification process. This process can take up to 2 business days.

How do I know if assess if my patient is ready to commit to making some positive lifestyle changes?
It is important to listen to the language the patient is using in response to questions you ask them about making lifestyle changes. The patient pathways  provide some guidance on how to assess a patient’s readiness for change and suggested questions to ask the patient.

Is the information collected through Healthy Habits secure?
Healthy Habits meets Australian security and privacy rules, regulations and requirements All personal information that is collected is secure and encrypted.
More information about privacy can be found in the Terms and Conditions.

For more FAQs visit the Healthy Habits clinician support page

Contact us

For any queries in relation to Healthy Habits, please contact the project team

Contact us