Improve Physician-Patient Interactions with Mindfulness
By John M. de Castro, Ph.D.
”For physicians, mindfulness and the exploration of clinical narratives helped them to be aware of how they are feeling, how events in their own lives might be influencing how they react to patients, and how they can better recognize the meaning and satisfaction derived from the practice of medicine.” – Michael Krasner
Stress is epidemic in the western workplace with almost two thirds of workers reporting high levels of stress at work. In high stress occupations, such as healthcare, burnout is all too prevalent. This is the fatigue, cynicism, emotional exhaustion, and professional inefficacy that comes with work-related stress. It is estimated that over 45% of healthcare workers experience burnout. Burnout frequently results from emotional exhaustion. This exhaustion not only affects the healthcare providers personally, but also the patients, as it produces a loss of enthusiasm, empathy, and compassion. This can markedly impair the critical communications between the physician and patient and result in substantially poorer quality of care.
Loss of effective physician-patient communications is a threat to healthcare. Hence, improving communications and preventing burnout has to be a priority. Mindfulness training has been demonstrated to be helpful in treating and preventing burnout and mindfulness training improves interpersonal communications. So, it would be reasonable to expect that mindfulness training would improve the communications between physicians and their patients. In today’s Research News article “Improving Communication between Physicians and Their Patients through Mindfulness and Compassion-Based Strategies: A Narrative Review.” See summary below or view the full text of the study at: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5373002/, Amutio-Kareaga and colleagues review the published research literature on the ability of mindfulness to improve physician-patient communications.
They identified 20 empirical or review studies on the effectiveness of mindfulness training on communications between doctors and their patients. They found that the published studies reported that mindfulness-based interventions reduced burnout, increased compassion, physician empathy, and quality of care, and improved physician-patient communications. Hence, training physicians in mindfulness greatly improves their ability to communicate and work with their patients. This is important suggesting that physicians should be routinely trained in mindfulness for their own benefit but especially for the benefit of their patients. These results suggest that this could result in more effective healthcare and reduced physician burnout.
So, improve physician-patient interactions with mindfulness.
“An emerging body of research points to the benefits of mindfulness for physicians. Practicing mindfulness can reduce physician burnout, and improve physician well being. Now research shows that physician mindfulness is good news for patients too: . . .physicians with mindfulness skills communicate well with patients, and provide better quality care.” – Emily Nauman
CMCS – Center for Mindfulness and Contemplative Studies
This and other Contemplative Studies posts are also available on Google+ https://plus.google.com/106784388191201299496/posts and on Twitter @MindfulResearch
Study Summary
Amutio-Kareaga, A., García-Campayo, J., Delgado, L. C., Hermosilla, D., & Martínez-Taboada, C. (2017). Improving Communication between Physicians and Their Patients through Mindfulness and Compassion-Based Strategies: A Narrative Review. Journal of Clinical Medicine, 6(3), 33. http://doi.org/10.3390/jcm6030033
Abstract
Communication between physicians and patients is a key pillar of psychosocial support for enhancing the healing process of patients and for increasing their well-being and quality of life. Physicians and other health professionals might benefit from interventions that increase their self-care, awareness, compassion, and other-focused concern, and reduce the chances of distress and burnout. There is substantial evidence for the contribution of different management strategies to achieve these aims. The goal of this article is to review the potential effect of mindfulness and compassion-based strategies for the improvement of physician-patient interactions. The acquisition of the necessary skills by physicians requires continuous education. Future research will be useful for identifying more evidence on the cost-effectiveness of this type of intervention.