Micheline St-Hilaire teaches Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction, Mindful Self Compassion, Compassion Cultivation Training and a variety of tailor-made mindfulness-based programs. As director of strategic initiatives and innovation with the Catholic Health Corporation of Manitoba, she consults for a wide range of organizations to foster resilience in support of personal, interpersonal and organizational well-being. Micheline co-founded the Compassion Project in 2010, an organizational change and development process aimed at co-creating the conditions for compassion to flourish in health and human service.
The Compassion Project, a contemporary contemplative pathway designed as an initial step to organizational change and development, will be presented. It serves as an effort to begin to re-found the heart of health and human service and nurture resilience and healing intra-personally, interpersonally, and organizationally.
Learning Objectives
At the end of this webinar, participants will be able to:
Patients continually indicate that their ideal clinician is one who listens. At the same time, the complaint that “doctors do not listen” is ubiquitous. This webinar explores this apparent paradox by addressing what listening actually is in clinical settings, its importance and impact and whether listening can be taught and learned.
During this webinar, Dr. Fuks teaches us what listening is in clinical settings and its function in clinical interactions, as well as why listening is the foundation of the clinical method. He also explains the different types of “deafness” found among caregivers and their causes. Finally, he instructs us how to teach clinical listening skills.
Providing care to patients whose cultures and languages are different from our own can be difficult. Patients come with different beliefs, values and styles of communication. Some patients distrust the health care system or health care providers – attitudes which they may assert strongly, or keep hidden. Language barriers add another layer of potential misunderstanding. This webinar presents an overview of cross-cultural issues in health care and the role of empathy and compassion in addressing them. We explore case studies and reflect on effective approaches to providing compassionate, person-centered care to patients of all cultural backgrounds.
During this webinar, Dr. Green allows us to reflect on the role of empathy in cross-cultural care and understand the types of cross-cultural issues that can be a challenge to empathic care. Finally, he describes how we can improve health care providers’ communication and trust-building skills in diverse populations.
This presentation tells an engaging story of discovery, occasional failure and growing success in improving care for patients with advancing serious illness while achieving triple aim improvement. Dr. Shulman and her colleagues’ strategy combines data, education and workflow optimization to dramatically improve advance care planning. In order to take the next step and engage providers, patients and families in difficult conversations, Dr. Shulman and her colleagues teamed up with the Serious Illness Conversation Project to provide a structured tool and coaching for their teams to push their organization closer to providing goal-concordant care for their patients with serious illnesses. Their results are measurable and dramatic, and while they still have a long way to go, they are seeing a change in their practice that goes beyond metrics.
During this webinar, Dr. Schulman allows participants to identify the importance of conversation as part of comprehensive advance care planning and how challenging this can be for providers. She also allows participants to understand the need for a multifaceted approach to education and training of primary care teams and the importance of a team-based approach, with diversity of skills, for advance care planning.
How a clinician behaves through nonverbal signals and style has an impact on patients and is considered an important component of patient-centeredness. Similarly, the clinician’s skills in accurately perceiving the patient (for example, the patient’s emotions, health experiences, needs, expectations or personality) are important for diagnosis, decision making and creating a wholesome relationship. Nonverbal skills can be improved through practice, insight and training interventions.
During this webinar, Judith discusses the importance of nonverbal communication in clinical and personal interactions, and reviews the supporting research evidence from social psychology and medicine. Tips from this webinar can be used for improving interpersonal perception skills in clinical situations.
Life is constantly changing. And life in health care is changing at an unprecedented pace. Sharon Salzberg, meditation teacher and renowned author, teaches us that in the midst of such change, there is not only uncertainty but also endless possibility and movement. To the question, “Can compassion be learned?” she responds with a resounding, “Yes!” Sometimes, all it takes is truly paying attention to the people around us. By paying attention to our experiences with sensitivity, we open our minds and our hearts, and understand how our actions affect others.
During this webinar, Sharon teaches us balanced ways of paying attention as a gateway to compassion. She explains the distinctions between empathy and compassion and why compassion for self and others is important in preventing burnout. Finally, she invites participants to experience a brief, secular compassion meditation as a method of transforming our worldview into one that acknowledges our fundamental connectedness.
Perhaps the most impactful approach to caring is to first recognize and ask about clues that patients are struggling to take care of their health, and then to adapt care to their particular needs and circumstances. For over a decade, Dr. Weiner’s research team has explored this two-step process, which they term “contextualizing care.”
In the first phase of their research, they trained a team of actors as unannounced standardized patients who would see a physician and indicate that personal struggles were undermining their health care. In the second phase they invited real patients with complex chronic conditions to audio record their visits. Encounters were sorted according to whether the care plan was contextualized, and then patients were followed for up to nine months. When clinicians made the effort to contextualize care, patients had better healthcare outcomes and there was less overuse and misuse of medical services. Remarkably, contextualizing care didn’t lengthen the visit. Dr. Weiner extended the research to include nursing, pharmacists and front desk clerks. During this webinar, he describes evidence that shows that listening, asking purpose-driven questions and adapting care plans to meet patients’ needs really does matter.
During this webinar, Dr. Weiner helps participants to describe the essential role of patient context in planning appropriate care, define “contextualized care” and its antonym “contextual error” and outline the implications for healthcare outcomes and cost of attending to patient context during the medical encounter.
Want to learn more about how to care for your patients and their families while taking care of yourself? View Dr. Beth Lown’s webinar, the first in our monthly webinar series on the concepts and skills you need to thrive in today’s health care environment.
Dr. Lown will introduce a framework of essential skills that put compassion and collaboration into practice and help you relate to patients, families and your coworkers more effectively. She’ll discuss some of the exciting new research on compassion, which demonstrates that we can learn to improve these essential skills, and she’ll talk about how compassion can help prevent burnout.
It would be beneficial to watch this webinar for context before watching the others in this series. Each monthly webinar will highlight one of the skills introduced in this session.
This presentation presents the results of an independent study (commissioned by the Schwartz Center) of the predictors of compassionate care, including attendance at Schwartz Rounds™.
In each of three sites, an online survey was conducted of all caregivers who were invited to attend Schwartz Rounds, whether they attended or not. The survey included questions about caregivers’ perceptions of success in providing compassionate care, teamwork related to compassionate care, the hospital’s support of compassionate caregiving and demographic information.
During this webinar, Colleen helps participants describe the Schwartz Center Compassionate Care Scale (SCCCS), a tool for measuring compassionate care, the predictors of compassionate healthcare and finally, describe what caregivers need to provide more compassionate healthcare.
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