Mindful Practice: Enhancing Quality of Care, Quality of Caring, and Resilience

Content

A retreat-like online workshop designed to improve the quality of care that clinicians provide while promoting their own resilience and well-being. It offers a participatory experiential learning environment, with a focus on developing the capacity for self-awareness in stressful and demanding situations.

“Being in community with the participants and especially in the small groups/dyads/triads were the most helpful parts of the program. I really had not expected being able to share so deeply with people I had never met.”

Session themes include cultivating attentiveness and presence, communicating with patients, families and colleagues, responding to suffering, responding to errors and bad outcomes, managing conflicts with patients and colleagues, cultivating compassion, addressing burnout and distress, and promoting self-care, resilience, and flourishing.

Despite the “virtual” nature of this online program, the actual experience is far from virtual. Rather, the program is dynamic and interactive and participants’ engagement is very tangible and present. We create a learning community using asynchronous multimedia presentations and reflective activities and live (synchronous) interactive large group presentations, paired dialogues, contemplative practices, and small group discussions to provide a fully embodied experience. The online format offers new possibilities for engagement educational and practice settings, time zones and continents, including opportunities for connections with one another beyond the confines of the course.

Program

State of the art online workshop

"I loved the rich and varied resources of music, intellectual studies, poetry, artwork, and meditation and having the different areas of my brain stimulated. You had a lovely balance of left and right brain activities which served to keep me alert, interested, and endlessly curious to see what was coming next. This vast array was the most helpful for me because I had wondered if sitting in front of a computer so long would fatigue me.”

Mindful Practice enters its 12th year of offering transformative programs, building resilience and promoting flourishing for health professionals. We now provide this program in a live online format using state-of-the-art educational technology, where this retreat-like workshop can be experienced without the need for travel. Participants in the online program have described the online experience to be just as intimate, connecting, and life-changing as it has been for the more than 800 physicians, nurses, psychologists and other health professionals who have experienced the program in person.

Learning objectives

At the conclusion of this activity, participants should be able to:

Increase clinician self–awareness and self-monitoring during clinical work and teaching
Increase clinicians’ ability to attend to patient’s needs, reduce and respond to errors, practice with greater effectiveness and compassion, and attend to their own well-being

“I am especially inspired by how well the Zoom format went for something so personal.”

Session schedule

All scheduled activities occur between 9:00am and 5:30pm Eastern Time (6:00am-2:30pm Pacific Time, 3:00pm – 11:30pm Central European Time). In addition, there are 45-90 minutes of required asynchronous activities each day. This is a fully immersive full-time retreat-like workshop.

Wednesday, April 28, 2021

9:00 am - 12:30 pm: Session 1
12:30 - 2:30 pm: Break
2:30 - 3:00 pm: Affinity Groups
3:00 - 5:30 pm: Session 2

Thursday, April 29, 2021

9:00 - 9:30 am: Morning Meditation Practice
9:30 - 10:00 am: Affinity Groups
10:00 - 10:30 am: Break
10:30 am - 12:30 pm: Session 3
12:30 - 2:30 pm: Break
2:30 - 3:00 pm: Affinity Groups
3:00 - 5:30 pm: Session 4

Friday, April 30, 2021

9:30 - 10:00 am: Morning Meditation Practice
10:00 am - 12:30 pm: Session 5
12:30 - 2:30 pm: Break
2:30 - 3:00 pm: Affinity Groups
3:00 - 5:30 pm: Session 6

“It is such a privilege to have participated in this class and to be a part of this community. The shedding and growing that occurred, in me personally, and for the whole group, was unexpected.”

Saturday, May 1, 2021

9:00 - 9:30 am: Morning Meditation Practice
9:30 - 10:00 am: Affinity Groups
10:00 - 10:30 am: Break
10:30 am - 12:30 pm: Session 7
12:30 - 1:30 pm: Break
1:30 - 2:00 pm: Affinity Groups
2:00 - 4:30 pm Session 8

For whom

Designed for medical practitioners (physicians, NPs, PAs) and others involved in medical practice and education. No prior experience is required, however, familiarity with meditation or other contemplative practices is desirable.

Start date(s)

New dates will be published soon.
Registration will be possible when new dates are published.

Mick Krasner
Michael Krasner, MD, FACP Professor of Clinical Medicine
Mick Krasner
Dr. Mick Krasner, Professor of Clinical Medicine at the University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry, Co-director, Mindful Practice® Programs practices primary care internal medicine in Rochester, New York. Dr. Krasner has been teaching Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction to patients, medical students, and health professionals for more than 18 years, involving over 2000 participants, including more than 600 health professionals. Dr. Krasner is engaged in a variety of research projects including the investigations of the effects of mindfulness practices on the immune system in the elderly, on chronic psoriasis, with caregivers of Alzheimer’s patients 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, funded by the Physicians Foundation for Health Systems Excellence, and reported in JAMA in September 2009. His current efforts focuses on working with practicing physicians and medical educators on the cultivation of Mindful Practice, with a focus on the connection between health professional well-being and the effectiveness of the healing relationship.

Dr. Krasner graduated from the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine in 1987 and completed his residency in both Internal Medicine and Pediatrics at the University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry where he is currently a full-time faculty member engaged in direct patient care, medical student and residency education, post-graduate medical education, and research in the University’s Center for Mind-Body Research. He has shared his work in peer-reviewed publications including research and reviews, book chapters, scientific assemblies, workshops, visiting professorships, and intensives in North America, Europe, Asia and Africa, focusing primarily on the roots of Hippocratic medicine through the cultivation of attention, awareness, and reflection of the health professional- healing relationship. He describes his personal mission as centered on compassion in medicine- for the self and others, and envisions a personalized health professional-patient relationship where healing is truly bidirectional, care goals are mutually derived, and the uniqueness of the clinical encounter reflects this central act of mutual high regard.
Ronald Epstein
Ronald Epstein, MD, FAAHPM Professor of Family Medicine
Ronald Epstein
Ronald Epstein MD is professor of family medicine, psychiatry, oncology and medicine (palliative care), Co-director, Mindful Practice® Programs, at the University of Rochester School of Medicine & Dentistry (Rochester, New York, USA). Dr. Epstein is a family physician, palliative care physician, teacher, researcher, and writer who has devoted his career to understanding and improving patient-physician communication, quality of care, and clinician mindfulness. He has received major funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and several foundations to do groundbreaking research to improve communication, the patient-physician relationship, and decision-making in the context of serious illness; to promote patient involvement in care; and to cultivate clinician mindfulness and resilience. >/p>
Through innovative programs in mindful practice and communication skills, Dr. Epstein has helped a generation of physicians practice more attentively and effectively; develop stronger relationships with patients; approach difficult decisions more mindfully; develop inner strength and resilience to combat burnout; and be more present when their patients need them the most. He directs the Center for Communication and Disparities Research and co-directs Mindful Practice® programs and the Deans Teaching Fellowship program.

Dr. Epstein is a graduate of Wesleyan University and Harvard Medical School and is the recipient of numerous lifetime achievement awards related to communication and humanism; a Fulbright scholarship at the Institute for Health Studies in Barcelona, Spain; and visiting fellowships at the University of Sydney in Australia and the Brocher Foundation in Switzerland. He is a frequent keynote speaker at major national and international conferences on medical education, communication, and mindfulness in health care. He has published over 250 articles and book chapters. His first book, Attending: Medicine, Mindfulness, and Humanity, was released in January 2017.

He enjoys cooking, biking, cross-country skiing and playing the harpsichord. His wife, Deborah Fox, is a freelance lutenist and founding artistic director of Pegasus Early Music. They have two children, Eli and Malka.