Hello, everyone. The topic of this presentation is Impact of Lifestyle Medicine Training on Levels of Knowledge, Skills, and Confidence in Health Professions Trainees. So as we all know, noncommunicable chronic diseases account for the highest proportion of morbidity and mortality amongst U.S. adults. These diseases can be attributed to several key harmful lifestyle behaviors, such as poor diet, low physical activity, tobacco use, et cetera. We also know that healthy lifestyle behaviors can not only prevent and treat, but can even reverse many of these chronic diseases. For the American College of Lifestyle Medicine, lifestyle medicine is defined as the use of evidence-based lifestyle therapeutic interventions, including a whole food plant, predominant eating pattern, regular physical activity, restorative sleep, stress management, avoidance of risky substances, and positive social connection. Many training programs have adopted evidence-based LM didactic and clinical training across a wide variety of health profession students to ensure trainees meet these competencies. However, practicing health professions often cite a lack of training in components of LM, resulting in insufficient knowledge, skills, and confidence. While there has been some documented success of LM curricula, there is little evidence assessing the efficacy of a formal LM curriculum. Given this discrepancy, our exploratory study investigated the health profession students' perceptions of their knowledge, skills, and confidence in the six pillars of lifestyle medicine. Our objective today is threefold. We wish to assess the health care profession's trainees' perceptions of their knowledge, skills, and confidence in the six pillars of lifestyle medicine. An IRB-approved study was conducted to assess health profession students' perceptions of knowledge, skills, and competency in the six pillars of lifestyle medicine as determined by ACLM, namely a whole food plant, predominant eating pattern, regular physical activity, restorative sleep, stress management, avoidance of risky substances, and positive social connection. A Qualtrics survey was used to collect standardized demographic items, hours of LM training, and measures of knowledge, skills, and confidence. Now, the survey was distributed to medical, dental, pharmacy students, and physician assistant trainees at the Western University of Health Sciences in Pomona, California. Data was de-identified, collected as an aggregate, and analyzed using cross-tab G-square analysis. The results investigating the impact of LM curriculum on the knowledge, skills, and confidence levels were analyzed from a sample size of 131, which included 66.7% females and 33.3% males, with an average age of 29.67 years. The distribution of the respondents' years of professional school training was as follows. 36.9% from the first year, 23.1% from the second year, 13.9% from the third year, and 26.2% from the fourth year. Statistically, significant correlations were observed between undergraduate and graduate exposure to the six pillars of LM and knowledge, skills, and confidence. P-values were less than 0.05. Additionally, there was a significant association between the two. Additionally, there was a significant association between the number of years enrolled in professional school and self-reported proficiency in the six pillars. Again, P-values less than 0.5. Self-reported confidence in the six LM pillars from highest to lowest was stress reduction, physical activity, sleep health, positive social connections, risky substance abuse, and nutrition. So in conclusion, our study suggests that increased exposure to LM curriculum increases the competency of healthcare profession students with potential implications for future practicing professionals. This increased competency will benefit not only the trainees, but also the practicing physicians, and more importantly, their patients too. This evidence emboldens academic programs to consistently invest in LM curricula across multidisciplinary groups to promote healthy lifestyle adoption and consequently mitigate the prevalence of chronic diseases. Some of the pertinent references have been listed down below. If you have any questions, please reach out to me at cprasad.westernu.edu. Thank you so much.

Lifestyle Medicine

chronic diseases

health profession trainees

competencies

evidence-based interventions