In an initiative designed to promote the application of lifestyle medicine in healthcare delivery amongst healthcare practitioners, Weill Cornell Medicine-Qatar (WCM-Q) offered a certificate programme developed by the college’s Institute for Population Health (IPH).
The 60-hour Certificate in Lifestyle Medicine (CLM) provides healthcare professionals with the skills and knowledge to use evidence-based therapeutic lifestyle medicine approaches to prevent and manage lifestyle-related chronic health conditions to reduce morbidity, and complications and suffering associated with the disease.
The evidence-based practice adopts behavioural interventions through positive lifestyle habits such as regular physical activity, eating a balanced whole-food diet, adequate sleep, tobacco cessation, stress management and other non-drug methods to prevent, treat and manage chronic diseases like obesity, type 2 diabetes, heart disease, hypertension, and cancer.
The course is aimed at educating and inspiring healthcare professionals about the preventative and therapeutic role of lifestyle medicine, and its impacts in helping to improve health outcomes, reduce healthcare costs and reshape the delivery of healthcare to make it more holistic and sustainable.
The latest edition of the course was delivered by local and international speakers and the programme attracted participants from Qatar and overseas.
The speakers were Dr Javaid Sheikh, dean of WCM-Q; Dr Ravinder Mamtani, WCM-Q professor of population health sciences and vice dean for population health and lifestyle medicine, and professor of medicine at the Centre for Global Health; Dr Sohaila Cheema, associate professor of clinical population health sciences and assistant dean at IPH; Dr Ahmad al-Mulla, senior consultant of public health and disease control, and director of Hamad Medical Corporation’s Tobacco Control Centre.
In his presentation titled “Building Resilience,” dean Sheikh who is also professor of psychiatry, and professor of population health sciences at WCM-Q, examined the reasons as to why resilience is increasingly important in modern life, and how it can be enhanced by all individuals.
Dr Mamtani said: “There is scientific evidence that lifestyle diseases can be prevented, treated, and even reversed by adopting healthy lifestyle measures. In the recent past, healthcare systems across the world have embraced blending lifestyle medicine with the conventional approach, to provide the best health outcomes to the population.”