Loving-kindness meditation: a tool to improve healthcare provider compassion, resilience, and patient care
Abstract
Background: Stress is a critical problem facing many healthcare institutions. The consequences of stress include increased provider burnout and decreased quality of care for patients. Ironically, a key factor that may help buffer the impact of stress on provider well-being and patient health outcomes—compassion—is low in healthcare settings and declines under stress. This gives rise to an urgent question: what practical steps can be taken to increase compassion, thereby benefitting both provider well-being and patient care? Methods: We investigated the relative effectiveness of a short, 10-minute session of loving-kindness meditation (LKM) to increase compassion and positive affect. We compared LKM to a non-compassion positive affect induction (PAI) and a neutral visualization (NEU) condition. Self- and other-focused affect, self-reported measures of social connection, and semi-implicit measures of self-focus were measured pre- and post- meditation using repeated measures ANOVAs and via paired sample t-tests for follow-up comparisons. Results: Findings show that LKM improves well-being and feelings of connection over and above other positive-affect inductions, at both explicit and implicit levels, while decreasing self-focus in under 10 minutes and in novice meditators. Conclusions: These findings suggest that LKM may be a viable, practical, and time-effective solution for preventing burnout and promoting resilience in healthcare providers and for improving quality of care in patients.
Additional Information
© Seppala et al.; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. 2014. This article is published under license to BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly credited. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated. Received: 16 May 2014; Accepted: 19 August 2014; Published online: 19 December 2014. Thank you to Rika Onizuka for helping with experimental data collection and to Maaheem Akhtar and Atsuko Iwasaki for contributing to the literature review. Authors' contributions: EMS conducted the experiment and drafted the article. CAH offered theoretical and experimental input and participated in drafting and revising the manuscript. DTHN participated in the drafting and revisions of the manuscript. JRD contributed to the manuscript. JJG provided essential guidance on the development of the experiment and manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript. None of the authors have competing interests.Attached Files
Published - art_3A10.1186_2Fs40639-014-0005-9.pdf
Supplemental Material - 40639_2014_5_MOESM1_ESM.docx
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Additional details
- Eprint ID
- 66351
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- CaltechAUTHORS:20160421-083556013
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2016-04-21Created from EPrint's datestamp field
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2021-11-10Created from EPrint's last_modified field