Royal College of General Practitioners - Online Learning Environment

This is a recording of a live conference that took place on 23 April 2026. This recording will be available to view until 21 January 2026.

Lifestyle medicine is a global medical discipline, teaching clinicians behavioural techniques to support patients with some of the root causes of ill health. These include assessing and addressing financial stress, poor mental wellbeing, social isolation, inactivity, poor quality food, poor sleep/shift work and harmful substances or behaviours such as smoking, alcohol, vaping and harmful tech use. Lifestyle medicine provides one-to-one assessment and support but requires wider public health population level interventions. The aim of these interventions is to prevent, treat and potentially reverse ill health whilst minimising the need for long-term medications.

The RCGP have analysed feedback following the overwhelming success of the first Lifestyle medicine ODE in April 2025 to develop a more rounded understanding of the subject area. This One Day Essentials Lifestyle medicine conference will describe lifestyle medicine practice and how it is applied in everyday clinical practice for GPs. The conference will cover the RCGP GP with extended role in lifestyle medicine pathway, the evidence for lifestyle medicine and where it sits with population and public health, how this practice can be used to reduce health inequity, avoid over-diagnosis and over-prescribing.

This year’s focus is on how to help people to improve sleep, reduce loneliness and isolation, address tech harms in particular amongst children.

Learning objectives:

• Define lifestyle medicine
• Describe how public health and population health interventions can be complemented by lifestyle medicines one-to-one support
• List the evidence for lifestyle medicine interventions, particularly for child health
• Develop skills to assess and intervene around the pillars of lifestyle medicine in particular around social isolation, tech harms and sleep
• Describe how lifestyle medicine can be used to address inequity
• List how lifestyle medicine can improve sustainable practice
• Describe how art and time in nature can improve health outcomes

Topics: 

• What is lifestyle medicine and introduction to RCGP GP with extended role in lifestyle medicine
• The evidence for lifestyle medicine and how it works with public and population health
• Lifestyle medicine is sustainable medicine and can improve planetary health
• Social prescribing, green space, art, sleep interventions and reducing harms from tech including social media
• Lifestyle medicine and health inequalities
• Interactive session sharing practical tips on how to fit a lifestyle assessment into a short consultation

Conference chair:

Dr Ellen Fallows, GP and expert in obesity and lifestyle medicine