Mindful practice is a means for health professionals to:

 
  • Enhance their self-awareness, wellness, and resilience
  • Cultivate strong relationships with patients and colleagues
  • Listen deeply, be present and offer compassion in the face of suffering and distress
  • Advance the quality of medical care they provide, reduce errors and make sound decisions   
  • Be leaders in creating mindful organizations that support teamwork, mindfulness and clinician health and well-being


Our research with physicians demonstrates that clinicians can learn to practice more mindfully and that mindful practice contributes to quality of care and to physician resilience and well-being.

When practicing mindfully, clinicians are attentive, present, curious, present and adopt a "beginner’s mind" when confronting challenging situations. These qualities of mindful practitioners transcend clinical specialty and clinical experience.

Mindful Practice® programs have been developed by a team of physicians on the faculty of the University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry (Rochester, New York, USA) led by Drs. Ron Epstein and Mick Krasner. The programs are organized around common challenges faced by health professionals, such as responding to suffering, bad outcomes, conflicts with patients and staff, errors, lapses in professionalism, burnout, and grief. Our current health care environment makes practicing mindfully very challenging. Mindful Practice programs address these barriers. We provide training to help clinicians and educators cultivate attention, curiosity, beginner’s mind and presence and bring these to the most difficult moments in clinical practice.