Mindfulness

Category: - Master Classes

Date: May 16th 2013 12:30pm until 5:00pm

Location: Old School Rooms, The Green, Stoke Gifford, Bristol BS34 8PD

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Master Classes for Senior Educators

Overview

An academic series of master classes mainly held at Deanery House on topical and emerging areas of medical education for the Deanery faculty. They will be open to the Deanery Educational Team and Educators in Schools and Trusts. Global and nationally important speakers will be invited.

Aim

Faculty development for senior educators in the Severn Deanery to assist in creating a consistent understanding about current developments and issues affecting medical education.

Reasons for offering the Master Class:

Mindfulness is a set of simple and powerful practices that can be incorporated into daily life to help break cycles of anxiety, stress, unhappiness and exhaustion.  The techniques used draw on cognitive based therapy and Buddhist meditation exercises and have become frequently used by mental health practitioners with a wide range of patients and clients to treat mild to moderate anxiety and depression.  Research has shown that using mindfulness activities can bring about long term changes in mood, happiness and well being and can prevent depression, daily anxiety, stress and irritability.  Some studies have shown that people who practice regular mindfulness based mediation see their GPs less often and spend fewer days in hospital, with increases in memory retention, creativity and faster reaction times.

Speakers details:

Dr Julia Wallond is a GP working predominantly in inner city Bristol, and trained to teach Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy through Exeter University’s post-graduate diploma programme, completing the course in 2011. She has collaborated with Dr Alice Malpass, teaching MBCT 8 week courses to patients with respiratory disease and anxiety or depression, and to medical students. She has led workshops for GPs and a series of monthly taster sessions for Bristol Mind, and is currently working with Bristol Mind, and with the Bristol Homeopathic hospital, to develop pilot mindfulness courses with the aim of increasing accessibility to mindfulness within the charity sector and the NHS.

Dr Alice Malpass is a NIHR Research Fellow at the School of Social and Community Medicine at Bristol University where she combines research and teaching in Mindfulness. Alice is involved in an on-going training program in mindfulness based approaches at the Centre for Mindfulness Research and Practice at Bangor University (2009-2013), whilst having her own regular practice of mindfulness for over 10 years.  Alice is principal investigator of a study looking at the effectiveness of Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) for COPD patients with anxiety and depression. Since 2010, Alice has taught regular 8 week courses of MBCT to small groups of medical students who are struggling with anxiety, low mood or stress symptoms. Students are referred through the student counseling service, the student advisory service or the student health service.  Alice runs taster sessions and the full 8 week MBCT course for staff based in the Medical Faculty as well as workshops and seminars for training GP’s. Alice supervises medical students wishing to take an elective in mindfulness as well as teaching a 5 week group based self-selected-component of Mindfulness and its Clinical Applications to 2nd year medical students every autumn.

Aim of this master class:

To develop an understanding of mindfulness and how it is practiced and share knowledge about  research into its health benefits.

Objectives: by the end of the master class participants will be able to:

  • Describe what mindfulness is and the sources of techniques and knowledge that it draws upon.
  • Summarise and use a number of mindfulness techniques and describe their advantages and benefits.
  • List a number of ways in which mindfulness could be used in both medical practice and within postgraduate medical education