I would like to invite healthcare professionals to keep the conversation about “mindfulness”
alive.I look forward to being connected.
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What a loss! Hope you are well and safely home in the UK Tariq
Please count me in? As I prepare students for the healthcare fields–Thank you
Sandy Bargainnier
That sounds like a great idea.Thank you ,Sandra!
Really sad to here of Mary Oliver’s passing. Loved her poem Wild Geese.
I would also like to be informed about mindfulness and the healthcare field.
Pawan.
How are you Pawan, welcome to the group.Lisa.
Good. Took a while re-adjusting from the slow pace back to normal.
Hope you are good.
Best.
Pawan
Hello Friends,
Starting an intro Mindfulness class at my gym. Light yoga, love and kindness meditation, walking meditation. Looking to merge fitness and mindfulness. First class is this Saturday! Will keep posted, hope all’s well with everyone : )
-Bill
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Fabulous news, Bill! Thanks for sharing and for the smile upon learning that you’re stepping forward into integrating awareness into the gym. :)
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Thank you Francesca, hope all’s well in Monteray!
I am preparing for my first introductory workshop and I found useful description of a plan in a post from 2016 by Ted Meissner
https://community.cfmhome.org/t/guidelines-for-offering-introductory-mindfulness-programs-a-question/2123?u=lf2019
Hope it will save some of you time in going ahead with this work.
Hey Lisa! Thanks so much for posting! For some reason when I click on the link it says I don’t have permission to view this - did you have to request permission to get to this?
Thanks!
Rebecca
Hi Lisa, I wasn’t able to open the link to view the Intro plan?
Hi Kelli, you have to scroll down to the end of the exchange between Ted and Gretchen and he posts the entire plan there.I could email you the plan if you email me directly.
Thanks but when I click on link I get “Sorry, you don’t have access to that topic!.”
Hi Kelli,how about you contact me directly through emails from Erik’s fundamentals list.I have yet to learn how the community access to topics works.All thr best,Lisa.
my email is kelli@dharmaranch.com
I missed Erik before our training ended and didn’t get on the list! Will contact Erik through here to obtain emails. Thanks so much Lisa. :)
Hello everyone hope all is well,
I need some help in addressing an avalanche of articles on burnout in physicians without consensus of how to deal with it. Now there is a new twist from burnout to moral injury and who is to blame: the system or individuals.
I am that physician who got out of the burnout hole with the use of MBSR, Self-Hypnosis, exercise and some other self-help tools. I thought of MBSR as great option for dealing with stress and burnout on individual level. I went to New Jersey Society Anesthesiology meeting and was faced with how little my hard-working colleagues knew about these tools of self-healing. While looking for help in persuasion of members of anesthesia Society to introduce MBSR, I accidentally found this report “ A CRISIS IN HEALTH CARE: A CALL TO ACTION ON PHYSICIAN BURNOUT” with conflicting message about a self-care strategies and here is the excerpt of concern:
“ Some have proposed “physician wellness” or “self-care” strategies — such as mindfulness or yoga — as a response to burnout and presented some evidence of limited success with such approaches.18 However, there are both practical and principled concerns to this approach. Practically, such approaches are likely to have limited impact as physicians typically do not have time to consistently fit yoga and similar coping strategies into their routine. Devoting scarce institutional attention and resources to makeshift solutions fails to address the root causes of burnout while preempt ing more effective interventions. Finally, such an approach inaccurately suggests that the experience and consequences of burnout are the responsibility of individual physicians. This is akin to asking drivers to avoid car accidents without investing in repairing and improving hazardous roads. Simply asking physicians to work harder to manage their own burnout will not work. For these reasons, “physician wellness” approaches to burn out should be deployed only as a complement to the broader interventions outlined in this report that seek to prevent and mitigate burnout through improvements to physicians’ work experience. The recommendations presented here thus reflect a broad recognition of the inadequacy of individual coping strategies in response to burnout in favor of systemic and institutional reforms to mitigate the prevalence of burnout.”
I respectfully disagree with the above message. I realize that my single experience of healing wouldn’t be sufficient to suggest the practice to the anesthesia society. I wonder if there are statistics of MBSR benefits in healthcare professionals as I need solid facts to be able to persuade members of anesthesia society to give MBSR a chance.
Hope to see some of you in April, Lisa.
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Hi Lisa–thanks for raising this issue and for offering your experience. I too came to MBSR in 1998 as a practicing Neurologist that was ‘burning out.’ And it helped me for sure. I repeated the MBSR in 2002 as I had stopped practicing mindfulness and things got worse again.
I retired from practicing in 2006 and have been teaching MBSR and other mindfulness programs since 2009. This includes at the 2 local Med Schools, at one of which we ran research programs delivering modified MBSR protocol (less time commitment) for Residents, Fellows, and Faculty. And then another program for MD-MPH students. I can share my insights on these projects with you, but as these were completed recently, no data as yet…other than to point out a high drop out rate. As you know, MBSR is a significant time and effort commitment, not every physician will be able to commit to what is asked.
However, I have seen the push back, more from physicians in training, that without system-wide changes, these so-called “code lavender” offerings will do little to help physicians, let alone the healthcare system at large. I have become sympathetic to their complaints. Still, most of the med students and physicians I interacted with do see the potential benefit in mindfulness and similar offerings, they just feel it’s unfair to put the burden on them while the system goes unchecked and unabated. This is how I heard it said, “mindfulness is something that will make the ‘canary in the healthcare coal mine’ bigger while doing nothing to stop the ‘poisonous gas’ of the toxic and ailing Healthcare system!”
Here are 2 recent blogs on this topic:
What we don’t talk about when we talk about professionalism: Resilience
The GMC state that personal development and career success require “emotional regulation strategies, coping styles and…adopting helpful self-nourishing daily habits.” Such steps towards wellness might include yoga at work, regular exercise, portfolio reflections, and mindfulness training. As beneficial as these activities might be, “faux self-care” is misleadingly presented as a “panacea” to medical professionals. The reality is that there is a working limit which everyone “will always feel ashamed for reaching … because that is what our medical culture prescribes.” That limit is not a weakness.
We Don’t Need Self-Care; We Need Boundaries
The problem with resilience or faux self-care is that it puts the burden of change on the individual, and exonerates the system. You can make as many to do lists as you want, have the best meal delivery service in the city, and eventually, you will reach your limit. And, you will always feel ashamed for reaching your limit, because that is what our medical culture prescribes. You will feel like it’s your fault, and you should do more, but in fact, when you have boundaries, it’s possible to see that you’re running a race that has no finish line. So, why does medicine keep selling us this panacea of resilience and self-care? I think because it puts the burden on us as the hyper-achieving physicians. And, we have certainly shown that we are capable of doing everything, plus much more than is asked of us. Doctors do not need to be more resilient. In fact, doctors have been too resilient, and that’s part of what got us into this situation.
I have not seen a lot of research on MBSR per se for job stress, burnout, but there is abundant work done on mindfulness programs for physicians, including at UMass, and Ron Epstein’s’ Mindful Practice® at U Rochester.
Please let me know if you would like to connect privately, I am very interested in what you find and what you might decide to do going forward. Thanks again for raising this topic…Gus
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