Authors: Jeremy Bramston, Dimity Pond, Parker Magin
Year: 2019
Event: 2019 TheMHS Conference
Subject: Creating ‘Mindful Doctors’. Clarifying Suitable Interventions in Undergraduates and Exploring Opportunities for Future Research - A Scoping Review.
Type of resource: Conference Presentations and Papers
Abstract:
Biography:
Dr Jeremy Bramston M.B. B.S. BSc. Med. is a current Lecturer at Newcastle University. He is involved in graduate and undergraduate training and research in ‘Mindfulness in Medicine’. Jeremy has also been a general practitioner for 30 years in the same community and runs and owns his own general practice.
Aim: Explore the vastly heterogeneous array of mindfulness interventions to produce a suite of useful and reliable tools for implementation in future medical courses and research.
This scoping review into undergraduate medical courses found three commonly used interventions: the Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction course, the Mind Body Intervention course as designed by Georgetown University and Mindfulness Meditation. Four reliable and validated questionnaires were frequently used to measure the effects of these interventions: the Depression Anxiety and Stress Scale, the Jefferson Scale of Physician Empathy, the Perceived Stress Scale and the Five Facet Mindfulness Questionnaire.
Interventions generally produced significant ‘P values’ in all four questionnaires. It is suggested that for future research, all of the above interventions and measurement tools can be used to estimate effects of mindfulness interventions. The Scoping review also identified five evidence gaps that could be targeted for future research.
1. Harm caused by mindfulness interventions.
2. Cost and numbers needed to treat of mindfulness interventions.
3. Sex differences in mindfulness interventions.
4. Research into selection bias in mindfulness interventions.
5. Triangulation of different measurement tools in the measurement of mindfulness interventions.
Learning Objectives
Learning Objective 1: To gain a clearer understanding of range of ‘mindfulness interventions’ available and their utility.
Learning Objective 2: To take away an overall picture of the state of mindfulness research and the gaps in the current research that may be worth exploring.
References
Finkelstein, C., Brownstein, A., Scott, C., & Lan, Y. L. (2007). Anxiety and stress reduction in medical education: An intervention. Medical Education, 41(3), 258-264. doi:10.1111/j.1365-2929.2007.02685.x
Phang, C., Mukhtar, F., Ibrahim, N., Keng, S.-L., Mohd. Sidik, S., & Phang, C. K. (2015). Effects of a brief mindfulness-based intervention program for stress management among medical students: the Mindful-Gym randomized controlled study. Advances in Health Sciences Education, 20(5), 1115.
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