General Practitioners

To develop healthy communities where we breed a culture of wellness, improve health outcomes and health literacy, and move from reactive to proactive care and prevention, then consumers/patients need to drive their own health care process and push our health professionals to stay on point.

Typically, patients are not activated nor engaged in their own care and have become used to relinquishing their decision making to the health professionals around them. Typically, patients didn’t see their role in researching their own risk, the issues that affected their parents and siblings, if they were from certain ethnic groups or socioeconomic bandwidths where the doctor is seen as almost God-like!

Newly diagnosed chronic disease sufferers can experience a multitude of fears of the physical and social effects of their illness, the costs of treating the illness and the powerlessness associated with failing health.

A multifaced approach is required by the GP to offer the best possible and most effective care and guidance until a patient’s last breath, however this can prove to be a challenging situation as many don’t have the time, skills and/or the training to be advocacy agents for their patients.

In fact, being a health advocate within current appointment timeframes can be difficult to achieve.

Being a health advocate assists patients in accessing resources, medications, social supports, and/or specialty consultation. The patient is informed as to what is required and available via Medicare and private health insurers and other funders, and how long they may have to wait for non-urgent interventions. Additionally, appropriate care-planning activities must be in place to ensure the patient reduces the likelihood of further chronic health conditions (prevention) and that they are managing current chronic health conditions well (monitoring).

The LLLS program will provide some of this ‘health advocacy’ for the GP by assessing health risk, educating the patient as to how to self-manage their health condition, assisting with the care-planning process and monitoring the impact of lifestyle changes.

Ideally, this will provide the GP with more opportunity to develop their relationship with their patients and ensure that the are supplying the right support to them.

Patient benefits

The key benefits of the Live Long Live Strong program are:

• Activates the patient to be engaged in decision making and involved in their own health care.
• Hyper-personalised program improves patient adherence to interventions.
• A patient centric educational program to help them gain knowledge, confidence and skills to successfully self-manage their care.
• Comprehensive risk profiling conducted at a younger age when interventions can prevent or reduce future chronic health conditions.
• Enables patient to acquire and maintain the skills to optimally manage their current chronic health conditions and avoid new ones.
• Amplifies trust between health care providers and patient.
• Cost effective program – alleviates need for personal coach.

Lily’s story

Lily is 62 years old and retired from her job as a registered nurse a couple of years ago. Lilly loved nursing, but once she hit 55 found the job increasing stressful and her heavy workload started to take a negative toll on her body. Lily embraced retirement and because she had more time on her hands, was able to turn her attention to her health and subsequently dropped a few kilos, embraced exercise in the form of an aerobic exercise dance routine and planned regular romantic interludes with her husband. Lily was very happy to gain some balance in her life, after a hectic career where she seemed to have little time to look after herself.

A few months into her retirement, Lily’s husband (after thirty years of marriage) packed up his bags and left her to move interstate with another woman – all without warning.

Lily was crushed.  She felt alone, embarrassed and struggled to cope. She locked herself away for weeks at a time to deal with her trauma. Alcohol became her best friend and crutch and as time passed, her physical health eroded as she lost a lot of weight quickly, didn’t effectively manage her nutritional state and commenced leading a sedentary lifestyle. Lily felt much older than her age, felt an overwhelming sense of inertia and started to notice (albeit without interest), regular bouts of lower back pain.

Gradually Lily began to heal and realised that she had to claw back control of her life. The problem was though that even though she had a strong health background, was an intelligent woman, she still didn’t know which direction or action to take.

Unexpectedly, Lily found out about Live Long, Live Strong program online and registered to participate. This was exactly the push she needed. She registered in the program, got a referral from her doctor and when her assessments results were through, had a diagnosis of osteopaenia. Lilly also suffered from high blood pressure, so was eligible for a GP management plan.

Lilly completed the program, became inspired by the community of support around her, loved the education and went on to be actively involved in her health. She learnt the benefit of exercise, embraced resistance training in addition to her first love, dance, which she could now regularly do with her granddaughter.

A big plus was that she was able to actively stave off an ongoing chronic health condition because of the initial diagnosis.

The care planning for one problem led to her being activated to prevent other problems, and likely saved her from premature death and unnecessary hospitalisations.