Compassionate care impacts patient satisfaction and health outcomes. Compassionate care is a habit of the mind and a skill that can be cultivated through training and practice. Mindfulness training can enhance human flourishing and relational empathy. In this proposal, our overall objective is to examine the effectiveness of an 8-week Mindfulness in Motion (MIM) program delivered to student doctorate physical therapists compared to a waitlist control (WLC) group. We will collect student-rated measures of resiliency, healthy emotionality, and bodily awareness before and after completion of the MIM program. After the students have completed the MIM program, we will further collect a patient-rated measure of compassionate care during their clinical practicum and compare these outcomes with the WLC group.
Prior to their clinical practicum, we will also measure students' heart rate variability, a measure of the arousal state of the autonomic nervous system, during exposure to a video related to empathy in the healthcare environment, and during the practice of a guided active compassion meditation. We will correlate these findings with the student's level of perception of their own internal bodily signals, termed interoception. These measures, interoception, and heart rate variability, are considered 'active ingredients' that can help to explain why mindfulness-based interventions may be effective and may serve as useful biofeedback tools for the future refinement of mindfulness training. A higher heart rate variability indicates a 'healthier' state of the nervous system.
Our central hypothesis is that students who received the MIM program will demonstrate higher scores in all measures (resiliency, healthy emotionality, heart rate variability, and interoception) compared to the WLC group. Our successful completion of this project will help to build a sustainable mindfulness-training program for Ohio University physical therapy students..