VIDEO: How lifestyle medicine interventions can improve well-being

ORLANDO — Lifestyle medicine interventions can improve medical students’ well-being and reduce physician burnout, according to an expert.

At the annual American College of Lifestyle Medicine conference, Carmen C. Lewis, PhD, MBA, vice president of institutional effectiveness at the Alabama College of Osteopathic Medicine, presented a poster on how she and her colleagues have applied lifestyle medicine in the context of medical education.

“Our opportunity is pretty great in terms of being able to establish a connection with lifestyle medicine through it as a vehicle with our students there who are going to ultimately become future physicians,” Lewis told Healio. “The idea there is we want to introduce them to these concepts earlier in their career, and then we'd love to see them apply that with their future patients going forward.”

The need for lifestyle medicine “is clearly there,” Lewis said.

“There's a high level of burnout with physicians, and an opportunity to influence well-being positively,” she added. “We've tried to be creative.”

Among the specific interventions Lewis and colleagues have evaluated to influence well-being are creating “nice outdoor spaces” like a community garden where students are encouraged to grow their own plants, nutrition and cooking classes, a sand volleyball court and more.

To evaluate the effect these interventions might have had, Lewis said they have partnered with Gallup, which administers a robust survey to see how well-being is improving among both students and staff.

“We've seen our scores improve each year, and so we're hopeful that we're going to continue this as a longitudinal study and continue to measure it and introduce new items that we hope will continue to improve their well-being and ultimately make for an improved lifestyle,” Lewis said.