IAMSE Spring 2018 WAS Session 3 Highlights

In case you missed yesterday’s Webcast Audio Seminar (WAS) Session, here are the highlights of this session:

Integrating Wellness & Nutrition: Lessons from University of Cincinnati
Presenter: Sian Cotton, PhD
March 22, 12 PM ET

Objectives:

  1. Briefly review the crisis of chronic disease and minimal attention to lifestyle education in medical schools and healthcare provider burnout as background
  2. Highlight 2 programs at UC that constitute a preventive and educational approach to fostering well-being
  3. Provide overview of first program: Turner Farm Student Wellness retreats
  4. Provide overview of second program: Mind-Body course, modeled after Georgetown University
  5. Present information on development, outcomes, and sustainability plans for both programs as models

Program #1

Teaching Kitchen: idea is to pair the culinary science with the nutritional science.

  • To transform Disease Care to Wellness Care, need to educate health providers
  • Transformation starts with education of students -traditional curriculum does not emphasize lifestyle modification
  • Inter-professional learning grows into inter-professional team-based care
  • Turner Farm’s Teaching Kitchen as platform

Have Student Wellness Retreats

  • Retreats are 6 hours usually on a Saturday
  • Evaluations are over whelming supportive of the Wellness Retreats with regards to presentations, experience and opportunities for both professional and personal changes.

Conclusion/Future Directions

  • Student Wellness Retreats at Turner Farm were highly successful
  • Sought after –Student Affairs promotes
  • Development of personal wellness skills
  • Increasing interest in Integrative Health
  • Greatest challenge: funding/faculty time to sustain
  • Future longitudinal student teaching kitchen sessions for continued healthy behavior change and knowledge

Program #2

Mind-Body Course

  • One out of two physicians experience burnout
  • This is not just limited to physicians but to all health care professionals
  • “Burnout is a response to chronic stressors that wear on a person over time – not acute ones such as a big event or a big change” Christina Maslack, PhD
  • According to John Kabat-Zinn Mindfulness is “The awareness that emerges through paying attention, in a particular way, on purpose, in the present moment, and nonjudgmentally, to the unfolding of experience moment to moment.”

Conclusion 1

  • Although the rates of chronic stress and burnout among physicians are rising, practicing mindfulness can reduce burnout and increase empathy
  • Student outcomes saw increase in mindfulness, empathy, positive affect, resilience and a decrease in perceived stress and negative affect.

Summary and Final Thoughts

  • Wellness, through nutrition, movement, mindfulness and connectivity is critical to expose students to early on
  • Experiential versus didactic-only
  • What is Required?
    • Faculty modelling
    • Integration, rather than “one-offs”
    • Resources

“Tell me and I forget, teach me and I may remember, involve me and I learn”

For more information on the next session or to register, please click here.