Teaching Mindfulness: Impact on Students, Patients, Practitioners
Purpose: High student stress levels impair clinical performance thereby negatively influencing relationships with patients and clinical instuctors. Students, patients, and practitioners need effecttive skills to regulate the body's stress reaction and efffectively navigate the challenges of graduate school, professional practice, and patient care. Mindfulness training helps meet this need. For students, mindfulness can reduce anxiety and develp the present moment awareness needed to establish a therapeutic alliance with patients. It improves cognitive flow thereby improving clinical competence. For practitioners, mindfulness has been shown to reduce burn out, compassion fatigue, and improve patient satisfaction. For patients, mindfulness is helpful for chronic pain conditions, recovery, adherence to exercise, pacing, and athletic performance. This education session will provide you with the most recent evidence for the effects of stress on the human body. You will be introduced to mindfulness, its applications to self care, patient care, leadersip, and resilience. You will learn mindful strategies that have the potential to benefit the anxious student, over-worked clinician, frazzled practitioner, and stressed-out patient.Methods and/or Description of Project: This project is the culmination of a course for clinial instructors and faculty members (DCEs) who want to address student distress for improved clinical performance, retention, and patient satisfaction. This course can be delivered in a weekend format, a professional development lecture, or in a staff meeting. Practices and activities can be infused into classrooms, clinics, conflict situations, and direct patient care. The course offers several experiential activities for participants to have direct practice with mindfulness and build a toolbox of strategies that can be applied across practice settings, student levels, and patient scenarios. The curriculum will be shared with participants and ideas to modify to fit the needs of the stakeholder will be included. Cases and experientials will solidify learning.Results/Outcomes: The course will be hosted by the Philadelphia Area Clinical Education Consortium and will be delivered in April of 2018 at Temple University. The outcomes of this course will include a heightened awareness of stressors in graduate education and in the clinic and numerous ways to use the theory and practice of mindfulness to promote resilient leaders in our profession. The participant (faculty member, CI, CCCE) will leave with tangible and easily accessible strategies to work with the inevitable stressors that influence clinical practice and graduate education today.Conclusions/Relevance to the conference theme: Our Leadership Landscape: Perspectives from the Ground Level to 30,000 Feet: Clinical instructors and faculty members are leaders who have a significant influence on physical therapy students. Students observe how their CIs manage stress, address it in their patients, and identify it within their own growth and development. Faculty members also play a pivotal role in sharing the theory and practices of mindfulness so that stronger partnerships can be fostered not only for the "easy" student but also for the student who struggles to manage self-care and address self-doubt. This work offers a foundation for entry to the profession and is the stepping stone to building a truly reflective practitioner.References: 1. Masuda A, Tully EC. The role of mindfulness an dpsychological flexibility in somatization, depression, anxiety, and general psychological distress in a nonclinical college sample. J Evid Based Compl. Altern Med. 2012;17(1):66-71. 2. Haase L. Thorn NJ, Shikla A, et al. Mindfulness-based training attentuates insula response to an aversive interoceptive challenge. Soc Cogn Affect Neurosci. 2016;11(1):182-190. 3. Tawokol A et al. Relation beteen resting amygdalar actiity and cardiovascular events: a longitudinal and cohort study. The Lancet 2017;389:834-845. 4. Cherkin DC, Sherman KJ, Balderson BH, et al. EFfect of mindfulness-based stress reducation vs cognitive behavioral therapy or usual care on back pain and functional limitations in adults with chronic low back pain: A randomized clinical trial. JAMA.2016:315(12):1240-9. 5. Zeidan F, Grant JA, Brown CA, et al. Mindfulness meditation=related pain relief: evidence for unique brain mechanisms in the regulation of pain. Neurosci.2012:520(2):165-173.Course Objectives: 1. Explain the role of stress in performance, health, and disease: the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis, the neuroal-heamtopoetic-arterial axis, and the allostatic load. 2. Define and apply 3-5 mindfulness strategies/tools that students, practitioners, and patients can use quickly and effectively to reduce sympathetic nervous system activity. 3. Construct a mindful practice course, module, or short teachable moment that addresses the needs of your setting and circumstances.Instructional Methods: Experientials Cases Lecture/powerpoint Dyad ReflectionTentative Outline/Schedule: 1.5 hour version-can be expanded to a full day 8:30-8:45 What is Mindfulness (mechanisms and related neuroscience) 8:45-9:15 Applications to the Student Clinician 9:15-9:30 Applications to the Patient 9:15-9:30 Appications to Teachers (CI, CCCE, Faculty) 9:30-10:00 Building the Toolbox: Self-Management for resilience across our profession