A Multicenter Study of Physician Mindfulness and Health Care Quality

The Article in Brief

A Multicenter Study of Physician Mindfulness and Health Care Quality

Mary Catherine Beach , and colleagues

Background Mindfulness refers to a person?s tendency to remain attentive to their own experience, thoughts and feelings. Over the past decade, it has been recommended that physicians enhance their own capacities for mindfulness when practicing medicine and interacting with patients. This study assesses whether clinician self-rated mindfulness is associated with quality of patient care.

What This Study Found Physicians rating themselves as more mindful have more patient-centered communication and more satisfied patients. Measuring the mindfulness of 45 clinicians and later assessing the quality of their interactions with patients infected with the human immunodeficiency virus, researchers found mindful clinicians were more likely to be patient-centered in their communications, more positive in their emotional tone with patients and more likely to be rated highly on communication and overall satisfaction by patients.

Implications

• Mindfulness may be an important pathway to a more humanistic, effective and satisfying practice of medicine. The highly reciprocal influence of patients and clinicians on one another, the authors add, is in itself a powerful and positive medical tool--perhaps in some situations more powerful than other interventions that can be offered to patients. They call for future research to determine whether improving clinician mindfulness can also improve patient health outcomes.