margaret cornelius
(we)llness advisor
Margaret is passionate about discovering and mainstreaming ways for individuals and communities to be healthy and happy using nature to sustain them. She has a nurturing approach to wellness, focused on lifestyle change, nutrition, and meditation. She embodies a compassionate ethos, advocating a positive attitude in all circumstances, including empowering those with mental and physical disabilities. Margaret believes in providing people with the knowledge and skills to stay well and live up to their full potential.
Career
Starting her career as a general physician, Margaret realized that treating people with illness was like mopping the floor without fixing the leaking faucet. This motivated her to look beyond clinical consultation. Within a short time she seized the opportunity to establish a first ever diabetes education and management center serving small Pacific Island States, including the Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, Samoa, Tonga, and Papua New Guinea (based in Fiji).
Diabetes was a major killer by the 1980s in Fiji and neighboring nations (it still is). Contributing to the National Diabetes Center, she provided educational support to patients and training to health care professionals nationally as well as in other island nations. Diabetes education and training led to a broader approach to prevention and control diseases in the 1990s.
Margaret’s team addressed lifestyle disease management and control with the support of health promotion principles such as empowerment, equity, multi-strategy, sustainability, as well as inter-sectoral, participative and holistic approaches. During this period, Margaret pursued and attained her certification as a diabetologist from the Lidcombe-Bankstown Hospital, which is affiliated with the University of Sydney, University of Western Sydney, and University of New South Wales, Australia.
Margaret was the Director of the first ever National Center for Health Promotion developed in Fiji with support from the Japanese and Australian governments. As part of health promotion, she co-wrote, supervised and edited the production of educational videos, posters, brochures, educational booklets and manuals, and conducted community based health promotion events.
To effectively use the health promotion principles in lifestyle disease management, Margaret was promoted to Director of Health Planning, Policy, Research and Information in the Fijian Health Ministry. She negotiated the international treaty, the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, on behalf of the Fijian government, developed and presented policy briefs for the minister, supervised and used research to support policy and planning, and helped develop Tobacco Control legislation for Fiji.
The early retirement policy of the Fiji government could not stop Margaret; she moved on to a health project funded by the Australian government aid program (AusAID). For six years she advised and provided technical facilitation services to the Fijian Health Ministry on non-communicable disease prevention and management as well as wellness promotion. She developed the Rainbow Approach to wellness, an educational tool for all life stages. She contributed to and supervised the production of training materials for health care workers to screen for risk factors for lifestyle diseases and advise clients on healthy lifestyles. She also designed and produced behavioral health logs for patients to self-monitor their conditions, and clients for tracking their health risk factors.
Margaret contributed to the development of the National Wellness Policy, National Diabetes Management Guidelines, National Nutrition Guidelines for people with diabetes, National Cardiovascular Diseases Management Guidelines and wrote articles to the Pacific Health Dialogue (a public health journal) on Wellness.
She retired from medical service in 2014 and is sharing her skills as a wellness advisor in a variety of areas including lifestyle medicine to sustain healthy nutrition and lifestyles. Recently, Margaret consulted with an NGO and the work involved nutrition coaching for groups of women, people living with chronic diseases and other partners in the rural and urban settings. Some nutrition education sessions were followed by healthy food preparation demonstrations using locally available, less processed, and organic raw foods such as root crops, staples, fruits and vegetables. These food demos encouraged using ripe fruits instead of sugar for sweetening and use local herbs and spices instead of salt and salty processed products for flavoring. Margaret is developing similar food preparation demos focused on plant-based and gluten-free recipes from Alchemus Prime’s recipe books.
Margaret follows a plant-based, gluten-free diet herself, and has been able to remain well and active even as she reversed her own risk factors for chronic diseases. She encourages, motivates and coaches individuals to attain and maintain an optimal state of wellness. For Margaret, this includes functioning to one’s fullest capacity, enjoying work, family, and Nature, and leading a balanced, stress-free and healthy life.
Education
Margaret holds a Diploma in Surgery and Medicine (DSM) from the Fiji School of Medicine, Fiji National University (equivalent to the M.D.). She completed a Post Graduate Fellowship in Diabetes at Lidcombe-Bankstown Hospital, NSW, Australia, in 1994. She has undergone LifeStyle Medicine Practitioner training and holds a certification. Margaret has received numerous other trainings, including green productivity and service sector innovation. She is a Reiki Master and has taken a course in Art of Living meditation. She is an avid Heartfulness meditator.
Service
Margaret has served as Education Director at the South Pacific Society of Lifestyle Medicine (SPSLM). She has served in many other volunteer roles, including Chairperson, Fiji Medical Council; Permanent Secretary’s representative for the National Road Safety Council and the National Occupational Health and Safety Advisory Board; National Coordinator, Non-Communicable Diseases Prevention and Control Committee; and Editor, Diabetes Awareness Newsletter.