Healing the Heart and Mind: Mindfulness Meditation for Health Care Professionals
More than ever, health care professionals find that stress has a huge impact on their patient's health — and their own. Mindfulness cultivates a stable healing presence that benefits patients and providers alike. Mindfulness meditation techniques are widely used to manage stress, and are especially effective at reducing the stresses of time pressure and excessive workload that make modern health care so difficult.
But mindfulness has much more to offer health care providers than simple stress management. The art of healing is as important as its science. Meditation techniques have been practiced for thousands of years because they cultivate presence, empathy, compassion, and connectedness in a simple and straightforward way. These experiences have a special importance for health care providers because they restore a component of healing that is often overlooked by our modern health care system. As we become more adept at dwelling in the living presence of our own experience, we begin to connect more deeply with patients, as well as coworkers and family members. Mindfulness practice provides a simple and practical way to recapture the calling of healing.
This CME/CEU program will review the basics of mindfulness meditation, and then explore how these techniques can be used to manage stress, enhance communication, and promote empathy and healing in clinical practice. Practical adaptations of mindfulness techniques will provide concrete mindfulness–based tools that can be used to help you to reconnect with what matters most in your personal and professional life. Participants will be asked to make a commitment to practice the techniques for at least 30 minutes a day during the eight weeks of the course.
Target Audience
This course is designed for any healthcare professional who would like to learn to use mindfulness meditation as a way to manage stress and enrich clinical practice.
Learning Objectives
Upon completion of this course, participants should be able to:
- Integrate mindfulness-based stress management techniques into the practice of medicine to:
- Manage professional stress
- Enhance communication
- Connect more directly with patients
- Make the practice of healing/health care more fulfilling
- Practice mindfulness-based stress management techniques.
- Discuss and review:
- The experience of a stress reaction and its components
- The way in which stress impairs physician performance
Course Details
| Date/Times: | 8 Thursdays: April 29 – June 17, 6:30 pm – 9:00 pm | ||||||||
| Location: | 3930 Chestnut Street 3rd Floor Philadelphia, PA 19104 Driving Directions | ||||||||
| Cost: |
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| Registration: | Registration Form | ||||||||
| Facilitator: | Michael J. Baime, MD | ||||||||
Courses taught by: | |
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Michael Baime, M.D., is the founder and Director of the Penn Program for Stress Management at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. The program was founded in 1992 and, since then, has trained more than 6,000 people in mindfulness-based stress management. At Penn, Dr. Baime is the director of numerous courses that teach mindfulness, meditation, and spirituality. These courses include an elective offered to medical and nursing students, "Mind-Body Medicine and Mindfulness: Theory and Practice" (offered in collaboration with the School of Nursing); a one-month, full-time summer elective, "Spirituality and Medicine" (offered jointly with the Department of Pastoral Care); this annual CME/CEU program, "Healing the Heart and Mind"; and a course offered through the Department of Psychology, "The Cognitive Neuroscience of Meditation". |
Dr. Baime has practiced meditation since 1969 and graduated from the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine in 1981. He is a Clinical Associate Professor at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is a recipient of the Provost’s Award for Distinguished Teaching. He is involved in numerous research projects, including investigation into the relationship between meditation training, empathy, and spirituality, on the cognitive neuroscience of meditation, and on the clinical applications of mindfulness training, including its effectiveness as a treatment for obesity, smoking cessation, and attention deficit disorder. | |
The University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine designates this educational activity for a maximum of 27 AMA PRA Category 1 Credits™. Physicians should only claim credit commensurate with the extent of their participation in the activity.
The University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine is accredited by the Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education (ACCME) to provide continuing medical education for physicians.
The Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania,Department of Nursing Development and Education is an approved provider of Continuing Nursing Education by the PA State Nurses Association, an accredited approver by the American Nurses Credentialing Center's Commission on Accreditation.
Testimonials
"I feel like I am beginning to reconnect with what brought me to medicine in the first place. I don't know what the future holds for my career but I feel that I am beginning to heal enough to make decision from a place of clam rather than reactivity." — Vicky B., M.D.
"This course has impacted every area of my life- making me more aware and teaching me to stay present in the moment. I am more fully there in my interactions with clients, less reactive and more accepting in my personal relationships and more compassionate towards myself and others. Thank you for all the gifts this program has to offer." — Hope H., Psychotherapist
