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.