Part 5 - Training and education
The Healthy Habits initiative provides educational resources and tools for GPs and their teams to enhance their knowledge and skills to work with their patients more effectively, particularly those with high risk factors for chronic disease, to encourage lifestyle change though improved diet and increased physical activity.
Patient Pathways
The Healthy Habits Patient Pathways (the Pathways) is a tool that GPs and Nurses can use help raise the topic of lifestyle change with patients and guide conversations in an encouraging and supportive way that motivates patients. The Patient Pathways encourage a structured motivational interviewing approach drawing on the 5A’s frameworks for identifying and managing behavioural risk factors in primary healthcare.
The Pathways provide a series of pathways to guide you in assessing patient lifestyle behaviours and providing tips and tools to motivate your patients. to support patients based on their readiness for change. There is specific physical activity and nutrition information for a range of common conditions that patients experience including cardiovascular disease, diabetes and mental health which supports you to provide tailored advice.
You can follow the interactive pathway with your patient or download the full pathway as a PDF to work through. There is also an option to download a copy of the responses you have recorded at the end of the pathway to then upload to the patient’s profile in your clinical software.
Resource Hub
The Healthy Habits Resource Hub (Resource Hub) is an easily searchable database of information, programs, guidelines and training opportunities on physical activity, nutrition and factors that contribute to health and wellbeing such as sleep, mental health, alcohol consumption and chronic conditions.
The Resource Hub houses a CPD directory for clinicians to access and identify relevant training and education to enhance knowledge and skills in supporting patients to move more and eat well. There are a range of health professional CPD offerings including RACGP accredited courses for RACGP Members and APNA course for Primary Health Care Nurses.
Webinars
A series of on-demand webinars will soon be available to help practices to implement Healthy Habits. Topics will include:
- An introduction to Healthy Habits
- A walk-through of the GP-dashboard and patient app
- Case studies of how general practices have implemented Healthy Habits into their practice workflow.
If you haven’t already, you can sign up here to receive an update when these webinars are available.