Mindfulness-Based Professional Training Retreats

In response to the increasing pace and complexity of medical practice, physicians and other health professionals are experiencing unprecedented levels of job dissatisfaction and burnout, affecting their sense of well-being and the quality of care they provide. A powerful but under recognized approach to these challenges is to enhance the practitioners’ capacity for mindfulness.

Mindfulness in medicine refers to the ability to be aware, in the present moment, on purpose, with the intention of providing better care to patients and of taking better care of oneself. Mindfulness is at the core of clinical competence, and includes the capacities for critical curiosity, attentive observation, beginner’s mind, and presence. The proposed program will introduce participants to the skills and tools necessary to bring mindful communications into daily clinical practice and continuing education.

Research suggests that courses in mindful practice and mindful communication can result in lower burnout and greater well-being, empathy and patient-centered care. In addition, mindful practice may result in fewer errors, a greater sense of presence, the ability to see a situation from multiple perspectives before reacting, and greater satisfaction from work. Our current health care environment makes mindful practice very challenging.

Accordingly, this workshop will address these external barriers as well as participants’ and learners own internal barriers to self-awareness such as unexamined emotions, premature closure, over concreteness and emotional exhaustion – which then manifest as feeling overwhelmed by suffering, ignoring the obvious, treating others like objects, withdrawing from unpleasant or anxiety-provoking situations, having difficulty tolerating ambiguity and uncertainty, and making hasty decisions.

This workshop will be devoted to establishing an experiential understanding of mindfulness meditation, narrative medicine, and the application of appreciative inquiry in interpersonal dialogue. Participants will work together in large and small groups, with didactic elements built into the experiential exercises. The morning session will center on themes of 1) the Present Moment and Teamwork. Participants are encouraged to use clinical experience as the source material for the narrative development and appreciative dialogues.

The afternoon will be devoted to deepening the meditative practice and working with challenging clinical themes in the development of narratives and the sharing in appreciative dialogues. These themes include Health Professional Burnout; and Mindful Practice and its Relationship to the Suffering Dimension in Clinical Practice. As the practice of mindfulness deepens, participants will bring a greater degree of nonjudgmental moment-to-moment awareness to their reflections relating to these themes, and will begin to experience the presence of meditative awareness in the midst of interpersonal dialogue. A final period will be devoted to exploring the personal, clinical, and other professional applications of Mindful Communication.

Target Audience

This daylong workshop is intended primarily for practicing physicians but is also appropriate for medical and mental health professionals of all sorts, seeking an introduction to mindfulness meditation and understanding its complementary relationship to the domains of clinical practice, quality of care, wellness and prevention of burnout.

Includes 1-Hour Special Session

Neuroscience of Mindfulness

With recent scientific and technological advances there has been a growing literature on the neuroscience correlates of contemplative practices. This discussion will focus on the roots, evolution and current manifestations of this body of work with special emphasis on its relation to mindfulness practice.

B. Rael Cahn, MD, PhD
Resident Physician
UC Irvine Department of Psychiatry

Mick Krasner, MD, FACP, Associate Professor of Clinical Medicine at the University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry, practices primary care internal medicine in Rochester, New York. Krasner and has been teaching Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction to patients, medical students, and health professionals for more than 12 years, involving nearly 1400 participants. He is engaged in a variety of research projects including the investigation of the effects of mindfulness practices on the immune system in the elderly, on chronic psoriasis, and on medical student stress and well-being. He was the project director of Mindful Communication: Bringing Intention, Attention, and Reflection to Clinical Practice, sponsored by the New York Chapter of the American College of Physicians and funded by the Physicians Foundation for Health Systems Excellence and reported in JAMA in September, 2009. He is very interested in the connection between health professional well-being and the effectiveness of the healing relationship, and speaks nationally and internationally on this topic.

Objectives

In this workshop, attendees will learn how to:

Define and describe the components of Mindful Practice and Mindful Communication
Describe how embodied awareness in interpersonal communication can help teams function more effectively
Define and describe the components of burnout
Describe physicians’ common reactions to suffering
Analyze one’s own reactions when encountering suffering in clinical settings

Agenda

9:00 - 9:15 am	Introductions
9:15 - 9:30 am	Mindfulness Practice
9:30 - 10:30 am	What is Narrative Medicine and Appreciative Inquiry?
10:30 - 10:40 am	Break
10:40 - 11:45 am	The Present Moment: Narrative and Appreciative Dialogue
11:45 - Noon	Teamwork
Noon - 1:00 pm	Lunch Break: Box Lunch Will be Served
1:00 - 2:00 pm	Neuroscience of Mindfulness Presented by Thomas Chippendale, M.D.
2:00 - 2:30 pm	Mindfulness Practice
2:30 - 3:30 pm	Health Professional Burnout Discussion, Narrative and Appreciative Dialogues
3:30 - 3:40 pm	Break
3:40 - 4:40 pm	Mindful Practice and its Relationship to the Suffering Dimension in Clinical Practice Discussion, Narrative and Appreciative Dialogues
4:40 - 5:00 pm	Mindful Communication Applications

Need More Information?

For more information, contact the UC San Diego Center for Mindfulness at (858) 334-4636 or e-mail at mindfulness@ucsd.edu