A 7-Hour Online Skills-Building Course for Enhancing Well-Being and Addressing Clinician Burnout
Prevent burnout, experience greater well-being, energize your clinical work, and find joy, resilience, and community.
Learn the Tools to Help You Enjoy Your Practice Again
- Our Flourishing in Medicine course offers a means to enhance your self-awareness, wellness, and resilience in your practice.
- Address and improve your relationships with patients and colleagues to advance the quality of the medical care you provide.
- Learn proven techniques to reduce stress, anxiety, burnout, and compassion fatigue.
- Through honing self-awareness, deep listening skills, compassion, and community, our online course will help you to flourish at work and navigate the stressful and demanding situations you face daily.
A program of Mindful Practice in Medicine,
University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry
Learn to thrive, be more resilient and focused
Online Course Sessions
Session 1 - Flourishing in Medicine: Thriving in Challenging Times
Learning Objectives:
- Describe attributes of clinicians that help them thrive in clinical practice, including quality of care, work, satisfaction, and reduced burnout.
- Discuss individual and structural/systemic changes that can help health professionals and medical organizations flourish.
- Incorporate one key skill into your practice to reduce burnout and stress, and enhance joy and meaning.
Session 2 - Noticing
Learning Objectives:
- Define components of mindful practice in medicine: attentive observation, curiosity, beginners mind and presence.
- Experience how self-awareness can help us be more attentive and present with patients and colleagues.
- Explore barriers to attention, curiosity, and presence.
- How building awareness, taking mindful pauses and deep listening can help you find purpose, meaning and joy at work.
Session 3 - Working Together
Learning Objectives:
- Discuss how attentive observation, curiosity, beginner’s mind and presence can optimize team functioning.
- Explain the relationship between good team functioning and patient outcomes and your own well- being.
- Implement awareness and communication in teams you work with to maximize team effectiveness and happiness.
Session 4 - Encountering Suffering: A Source of Difficulty and a Source of Purpose in Your Work
Learning Objectives:
- Examine and analyze the domains of suffering and how clinicians typically respond.
- Compare and contrast empathy and compassion as ever-present dynamics and as reactions/responses to suffering.
- Appraise the role of presence in promoting a healthy professional relationship towards suffering in the medical context.
- Explore how responding to suffering can enhance clinicians’ sense of purpose and well-being.
Session 5 - Furious to Curious: Managing Conflict with Patients, Colleagues, and Staff
Learning Objectives:
- Describe your own typical reactions and optimal responses to conflict.
- Practice ways of developing “mental stability” in the face of conflict, and reducing the emotional toll of conflicts on your well-being.
- Show how being mindful (e.g., attentive, curious, flexible, present) can help you deal more effectively with conflict.
Session 6 - When Things Go Wrong: Responding to Errors and Bad Outcomes
Learning Objectives:
- Identify and describe types of medical errors.
- Compare and contrast cognitive errors and mindful qualities that can mitigate errors.
- Appraise and critique individual and organizational mindful responses to errors on clinical work.
Session 7 - Growing Resilience, Robustness, and Meaning in Your Work: What You and Your Organization Can Do
Learning Objectives:
- Describe organizational and individual factors that affect burnout and resilience.
- Analyze how organizational change and individual practices in the workplace can decrease burnout and improve well-being.
- Develop skills to help health professionals relate in a healthier way to the inherent stresses within medical work.
- Practice activities that can build awareness and resilience in healthcare.
Session 8 - Transforming Health Systems: Organizations, Leadership, and Vision
Learning Objectives:
- Describe qualities of well-functioning mindful organizations.
- Explore the sources of stress and distress in organizations.
- To sharpen your skills as an effective leader, helping others grow.
- To connect with others in the organization with attentiveness, curiosity, beginner’s mind, and presence.
- To accept and thrive in uncertainty, unpredictability and limited control.
- Describe how being mindful (e.g., attentive, curious, flexible, present) can help you understand and lead small teams and large organizations.
Watch or Listen Instantly and Earn Up to 7.50 AMA PRA Category 1 Credits™
Meet the Course Faculty
Ronald Epstein, MD, FAAHPM
Professor of Family Medicine, Oncology and Medicine
American Cancer Society Clinical Research Professor
Co-Director, Center for Communication and Disparities Research
Co-Director, Mindful Practice in Medicine
University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry
Dr. Ron Epstein has been passionately devoted to promoting physician self-awareness, mindfulness, and effective communication in clinical practice. He is a family physician and palliative care physician and now devotes most of his time teaching, researching, and writing about communication and mindfulness in clinical care.
Over the past 25 years, Dr. Epstein has developed innovative educational programs in mindful practice, communication skills, the patient-physician relationship, physician self-awareness and assessment of professional competence. His seminal 1999 JAMA paper, Mindful Practice, opened the door to exploring how clinician mindfulness can positively influence the clinician-physician relationship, resilience, and quality of care.
Dr. Epstein is a frequent keynote speaker at conferences on medical education, communication, and mindfulness, and has published over 300 articles and chapters. His first book, “Attending - Medicine, Mindfulness, and Humanity” was released in 2017.
Attending: Medicine, Mindfulness, and Humanity
Attending is the first book about mindfulness and medical practice written for patients, their families, and for doctors and others providing health care. It is a groundbreaking, intimate exploration of how doctors approach their work with patients. Available on Kindle and Audible. Order on Amazon here.
“Phenomenally useful to physicians and to all of us who are desperately in need of true health care and caring.”
“A work of heart and head... this book is exactly what the field of medicine needs.”
Michael ("Mick") Krasner, MD, FACP
Professor Emeritus of Medicine
Co-Director, Mindful Practice in Medicine
University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry
Dr. Mick Krasner practices primary care internal medicine in Rochester, New York and co-directs the Mindful Practice programs at the University of Rochester and has been teaching Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction to patients, medical students, and health professionals for more than 21 years, involving nearly 4,000 participants, and over 1,500 health professionals. His research includes investigations into the effects of mindfulness practices on the immune system in the elderly, on chronic psoriasis, and with caregivers of Alzheimer’s patient.
He was the project director of Mindful Communication: Bringing Intention, Attention, and Reflection to Clinical Practice reported in JAMA in September, 2009. His current efforts focus on working with practicing physicians and medical educators on the cultivation of Mindful Practice, with a focus on the connection between health professional well-being and the effectiveness of the healing relationship.
Dr. Krasner graduated from the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine in 1987 and completed his residency in both Internal Medicine and Pediatrics at the University of Rochester. He has shared his work in peer-reviewed publications, book chapters, scientific assemblies, workshops, visiting professorships, and intensives in North America, Europe, Asia and Africa, focusing primarily on the roots of Hippocratic medicine.
As the fifth of six children whose father was the seventh of seven children, Mick uses his chaotic upbringing as his motivation to make sense of human flourishing. For fun he enjoys walking–to nowhere in particular.
Jointly Sponsored by
Online CME Accreditation
The Center for Emergency Medical Education (CEME) is accredited by the Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education to provide continuing medical education for physicians.
The Center for Emergency Medical Education (CEME) designates this self-study activity for a maximum of 7.50 AMA PRA Category 1 Credits™. Physicians should claim only the credit commensurate with the extent of their participation in the activity.
The AOA automatically recognizes AMA PRA Category 1 Credit™ as AOA Category 2 credit.
Both PA and NP organizations recognize AMA PRA Category 1 credit™ as approved CME.
Target Audience
This online course is intended for physicians, nurse practitioners, physician assistants, medical educators and other health professionals, in all settings and specialties, who wish to experience greater joy in practice, address work-related stress and demanding situations, and reduce burnout and moral distress.
Learning Objectives
After completing the Flourishing in Medicine online course, participants will be able to:
- Describe organizational and individual factors in burnout and moral distress in medicine.
- Discuss individual and structural/systemic changes that can help health professionals and medical organizations flourish.
- Incorporate key skills into clinical practice and teaching to reduce burnout and stress, and enhance joy and meaning.
- Increase clinician self-awareness and self-monitoring during clinical work and teaching.
- Increase clinicians’ ability to attend to patient’s needs, reduce and respond to errors, practice with greater effectiveness and compassion, and attend to their own well-being.