Mindfulness Rounds Initiative - A Short Mindfulness-Based Program for A Busy Workplace

Overview

An 8 week course of mindfulness education and practices will be presented to all staff, patients, and visitors voluntarily attending the thrice weekly presentations. The goal is to reduce staff stress, improve communication, enhance patient satisfaction, and improve quality of care.

"Mindfulness Rounds" Care-giver well-being is recognized as an important goal in decreasing burnout, increasing job satisfaction, and may have implications in improving quality of care and patient satisfaction. Mindfulness training is a well-studied tool used to enhance care-giver well-being. The impact of a Mindfulness training experience for caregivers, support staff, and patients and their families working together in a hospital unit on patient satisfaction has not been well studied, if at all. The researchers propose instituting a pilot program of Mindfulness Rounds on a given hospital unit and assessing the effect on employee well-being, patient satisfaction, and quality of care. Introduction: The physical and mental health of healthcare practitioners (HCPs) has become an area of attention and research in recent years as HCP burnout and suicide are now openly discussed concerns in medicine. Well-being education is now a required curricula component by the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME). Mindfulness is a technique and philosophical concept which has received significant attention in the medical literature as a tool for increasing HCP well-being. Mindfulness describes the idea of maintaining a conscious presence in the present, of avoiding obsessing about the past or the future, and of continuously being aware of, and grateful for, the things we have in life as opposed to the things we don't. Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) is one particular system, developed by Jon Kabat-Zinn over 30 years ago, which has been built into a well-structured certified training program for teaching mindfulness. Numerous studies have used MBSR or similar techniques to advance HCP psychologic well-being, and while some have investigated a variety of HCP training techniques to improve the patient experience, few have sought to explore a relationship between the impact of mindfulness training for HCP on patient satisfaction, quality of care outcomes, and HCP overall health. To the investigators' knowledge, no one has sought to bring mindfulness education to an entire hospital unit - physicians, nurses, support staff, as well as patients and their families wherever possible - with the goal of improving both HCP and the overall patient experience. The researchers propose instituting a pilot program of Mindfulness Rounds on a given hospital unit and assessing the effect on employee well-being, patient satisfaction, and quality of care.

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Outcomes