Healthy Lifestyle Tool

The Health Professionals Tool was developed to encourage Health Professionals to integrate healthy lifestyle counselling into their day to day practice.

Prevention - building a lifetime of good health

Prevention has the greatest potential to reduce the significant burden of chronic diseases and increase the overall level of the population’s health. (2)

All health professionals are part of the prevention network. The current literature supports utilizing Brief Clinical Interventions with the Stages of Change model in working with clients, to motivate behaviour change. (21) An intervention as brief as 3-5 minutes can make a difference in a client’s thinking, especially if the intervention is tailored to the stage the client is in. (32)

Patients trust the advice of health professionals. As a health professional you are uniquely positioned to help a patient understand the importance of good lifestyle habits. Brief Clinical Interventions with your patients encourage them to take positive action towards health.

Patients’ success can be further enhanced by referrals to community agencies for resources and programs that will assist them to eat well, become more active and be tobacco free/smoke free.

Research indicates that many health professionals articulate a lack of knowledge and skills in the area of healthy lifestyle counselling and this Tool is an attempt to provide a framework that allows health professionals to think through this process and increase their skill level.

We hope that this will assist you and your colleagues in your goals to integrate Brief Clinical Intervention into your practice, thereby enhancing the prevention network that will, in the long term, reduce chronic disease and ease the burden of cost and suffering to our society.

Note on Terminology: You will find that while the phrase “brief clinical intervention” is used most often in this document, “minimal contact intervention” is also used at times, especially in the section “Tobacco-Free Living”. These two phrases are considered equivalent and interchangeable. As well, the terms “tobacco free” and/or “smoke free” are used to refer to all tobacco products, including cigarettes, chew tobacco, etc.