University of Washington Family Medicine ARTE Module

Mindfulness in Practice

Mindful practitioners attend in a nonjudgmental way to their own physical and mental processes during ordinary, everyday tasks, including:

• Patient care
• Teaching
• Learning
• Working as part of a team

This critical self-reflection enables physicians to:

• Listen attentively to patients’ distress,
• Recognize their own weaknesses
• Refine their technical skills
• Make evidence-based decisions
• Clarify their own values

These habits enhance the physician’s ability to can act with compassion, technical competence, presence, and insight.

Mindfulness informs all types of professionally relevant knowledge, including personal experience, processes and know-how, each of which may be tacit or explicit.

Mindful practitioners use a variety of means to:

• Engage in moment-to-moment self-monitoring
• Bring to consciousness their tacit personal knowledge
• Be aware of their deeply held values
• Adopt new information and perspectives
• Cultivate curiosity in both ordinary and novel situations.

Mindfulness is a link between relationship-centered care and evidence-based medicine and should be considered a characteristic of good clinical practice.

(Adapted from Epstein 1999.)

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