“I seemed calmer, clearer, and better able to react to challenging situations”: phenomenological reflections on learning about mindfulness in health professions education
Bibliographic record
Abstract
It is widely acknowledged that healthcare practitioner well-being is under threat, as many factors like excessive workloads, perceived lack of organizational support, the rapid introduction of new technologies, repercussions of the COVID-19 pandemic, and other factors have transformed the health care workplace. Distress, anxiety and burnout are on the rise, and are particularly concerning for health professions' students who must navigate challenging academic and clinical demands, in addition to personal responsibilities. While not a panacea for the systemic issues at play, 'mindfulness practices' have shown some promise in supporting students to navigate stressful environments. Yet despite calls for more phenomenological studies, little is known about health professions students' lived experiences of learning about and using mindfulness in higher education contexts. The objective of this hermeneutic phenomenological study was to inquire into the first-hand lived experiences of health professions students by examining their written reflections on learning about and using mindfulness in a higher education context. The study reports on themes identified in an analysis of students' phenomenological reflections written during and following a mindfulness elective course offered at a Canadian University. The analysis revealed four predominant themes: (a) reframing perceptions, (b)'being' while 'doing', (c) witnessing the struggle, and (d) compassion for self and others. In a time when health professionals are increasingly under strain, and systemic reform is needed but slow to take shape, the findings of this study reveal potential affordances of mindfulness for helping students to navigate the myriad of challenges they face. The findings are unique in their in-depth exploration of students' reflections on the experience of learning about and engaging in 'mindfulness practices' in a higher education context. The findings contribute first-hand perspectives to the evolving field of mindfulness education research and generate new conversations about mindfulness education in the health professions curriculum.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.010 | 0.019 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.029 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.011 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".