Mindfulness in Medicine. 0.5 Credit Hours

Catalog description

Mindfulness is important in one's personal life as well as professional work. It supports the physician in successfully caring for patients, connecting to colleagues and patients, and maintaining personal satisfaction. There is some evidence that mindfulness training in the professional development of physicians helps with effective decision making and reducing medical errors, increases sensitivity to feelings, improves attention and memory, decreases stress, and enhances reflective consideration in problem solving and decision making. Senior students are facing the formative transition to residency training, which is laden with new challenges and stressors such as work demands that conflict with emotional and physical availability for family and friends, an immense amount of new knowledge and skill to acquire, increased work hours in a complex health care system, and coping with death and the potential for errors in patient care. New interns are fearful of making mistakes that harm a patient and worry about their work-life balance. The goal of this course is to provide and apply skills in mindfulness for everyday practice so that learners are armed with the knowledge and techniques to improve their attention, renew their perspective during times of stress, build resiliency, and prevent errors and harm in their professional practice. Learning Objectives: By the end of this course, students should be able to: 1. Identify personal characteristics of leadership, bias, and resiliency and use this self-awareness to enhance professional relationships 2. Integrate techniques of mindfulness into daily life to improve attention to personal well-being, reduce stress, and avoid burnout during residency training 3. Use self-reflective writing to increase self-awareness, broaden perspectives, and cultivate empathy 4. Apply mindfulness to clinical practice to improve patient communication, recognition of error-prone situations, and quality of medical care. Course topics include: 1) Self-awareness and Resiliency; 2) Leadership, Bias, and Collaboration; 3) Mindfulness in Patient Care: Self-care and preventing medical errors; and 4) Narrative Medicine. Learning of course topics will be accomplished with a combination of self-study educational resources and assigned readings, didactic lecture, skills workshops, writing exercises, and small group discussion. Each student will be required to complete a portfolio of reflective writing and surveys, which will be used in small group discussions. To monitor the effectiveness of the course content and teaching methods, students will complete pre- and post-course surveys. Prerequisites: Completion of all core clerkships.