Lifestyle medicine in veteran care: beyond targets, towards sustainable change

Course overview
This interactive eLearning module follows Marlene Taylor — a 44-year-old Royal Australian Navy veteran and Aboriginal woman living with type 2 diabetes and post-traumatic stress disorder — through her first general practice consultation and a six-week follow-up. Through Marlene’s story, the module applies the pillars of lifestyle medicine, the Stages of Change framework and DVA-funded care pathways in a way that reflects the realities of veteran-centred, trauma-informed and culturally safe care in Australia.

What you will learn 

• The veteran lens: how military service shapes lifestyle behaviour, identity and engagement with healthcare
• The six pillars of lifestyle medicine — nutrition, physical activity, sleep, stress and trauma, substance use and social connection — applied through a trauma-informed and culturally safe lens.
• The Stages of Change model and core health-coaching techniques (OARS, decisional balance, motivational interviewing). 
• When and how to use DVA-funded pathways: the Veterans’ Health Check, Coordinated Veterans’ Care, Allied Health Treatment Cycles and Non-Liability Health Care.
• How to build a lifestyle medicine prescription that is realistic, sustainable and rooted in the patient’s own goals.

Why you should attend 
Veterans live with disproportionately high rates of chronic disease, mental health conditions and persistent pain. Standard chronic disease consultations rarely capture this complexity, and DVA-funded pathways remain under-utilised in routine practice. This module gives general practitioners, practice nurses and allied health professionals a structured, evidence-based and culturally safe framework for delivering lifestyle medicine to veteran patients — and the confidence to put it into practice from the next consultation onward.