Keywords: Protecting against burn out, fostering empathy and self-care among healthcare providers, mindfulness work with patients

Justification:

Physical and mental self-care, quality of life and highly professional behavior represents a major challenge for healthcare providers. Complexity, acceleration and task intensification characterize their professional and personal everyday lives. The health burden can have a significant impact on medical practice and is a cause for concern worldwide. In 2017, they prompted the World Medical Association to include medical self-care in the revised Geneva Declaration. The German Medical Association placed the health of physicians at the focus at the annual meeting in 2019.

Objective:

The “Magdeburg Mindfulness Modules (MAM)”-program has been developed since 2018 at the Institute of General Medicine in Magdeburg to support healthcare providers maintaining physical and psychological presence, self-care, empathy and (self-)compassion as well as professional communication. It is based on the ReSource project of the Max Planck Society as well as the National Competence-Based Learning Goals Catalog for Medicine (NKLM)

Organisation:

Mindfulness-based techniques underlying the MAM program, which help maintaining physical and psychological presence, self-care, empathy and (self-)compassion, dealing with difficult feelings and effectively support medical communication and research (mindfulness, empathy, health burden of healthcare providers) are the subject of the workshop.

Participation:

A presentation provides an introduction to the topic. The group practice (meditation cushions and yoga mats are provided for up to 15 participants) allows (first) experiences of body presence, affect, and cognition. The experiences are reflected upon and discussed in the group.

Expected outcomes:

The overview of the topic, the shared practice and discussion are intended to encourage healthcare providers to practice self-care, (self-)compassion and mindful work, to promote their health and to support professional communication and patient care.