The Australasian Society for Behavioural Health and Medicine (ASBHM) is a volunteer-run organisation. It is established as one of the national societies constituting the International Society of Behavioral Medicine (ISBM). “Behavioural health and medicine” is defined as “the interdisciplinary field concerned with the development and integration of psychosocial, behavioural and biomedical science knowledge and techniques relevant to health and illness and the application of this knowledge and these techniques to prevention, etiology, diagnosis, treatment and rehabilitation” (Charter of the ISBM, 1990). The scope of behavioural health and medicine extends from research efforts to understand basic brain-body mechanism interactions; explorations of clinical diagnoses, the development, conduct and evaluation of interventions; to undertaking public health disease-prevention and health-promotion strategies. The ASBHM supports this definition, and aims to serve the needs of all health-related disciplines concerned with the integration of behavioural and biomedical sciences.
