Integrating Mindfulness into the Education Programs of All Health Care Professionals?

     "Students and clinicians in the allied health profession possess a demanding workload and are susceptible to burnout, which may reduce the ability to attend, concentrate, and make good decisions. Consequently, it is important to investigate how a student manages his own stress. Secondly, offering an opportunity for students to learn and practice mindfulness techniques would facilitate the enhancement of one’s full professional capacity by learning to be less reactive to stress-related activities and to increase self-awareness that enables him/her to be more connected with himself or herself and with one’s clients in preparation for intervention sessions.
     Currently, mindfulness is incorporated in graduate curricula in a variety of formats, including as being the topic of an elective course. The 'Mind/Body Medicine and the Art of Self-Care' is a 15-week, three-credit elective in the graduate school curriculum of counseling at Montana State University. The course, open to graduate students in the counseling field as well as all allied-health disciplines, was designed (a) to familiarize students with mindfulness and its relevance for the health and wellness fields and (b) to offer future healthcare providers practical methods for self-care and prevention of burnout. A qualitative study that explored the effects of this course on graduate student’s lives corroborated the results of previous mindfulness-based programs relating to enhanced self-awareness. Professor John Christopher, who primarily designed this course to improve the student’s inner resources for growth, learning, and healing through mindfulness-based stress reduction techniques, found that it also had significant impact on the students’ counseling practices. One student stated that this course was the most transformative experience in her graduate education and had the maximum influence on her clinical work. Overall, the impact of this experience has been so great that there have even been discussions about making this course a requirement for counseling students. Positive outcomes from this course include increased comfort with silence during interventions, heightened clarity of thought and capacity for reflection, enhanced ability for empathy and listening skills, and improved ability to focus on one’s clients and the therapeutic process. Additionally, students reported an intention to continue practicing mindfulness on their own given the demonstrated value to them as students and clinicians. This type of class may act as a paradigm for the future integration of mindfulness for all allied-health professional educational programs.

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