9th Annual Conference

As anyone working in health care knows, medical professionals caring for the underserved face high rates of burnout. We have heard a lot about the problem, but few are offering actionable solutions.

We bring our perspective as a long standing family medicine residency in an underserved community. We have found ways to utilize integrative medicine (IM) to simultaneously support our most vulnerable patients and to cultivate meaning, efficacy, and resilience among trainees and staff.

IM can alleviate burnout in several ways. Firstly, many of the IM tools we teach our patients are ones we can also apply to ourselves to improve our wellbeing. Furthermore, IM offers a unique approach to conditions and patients that conventional medicine finds the most “difficult.” Perhaps most importantly, IM offers hope that there is an alternative to the disease-focused paradigm that we are immersed in during training and beyond.

We will present our experiences and facilitate exercises to help participants identify key areas for intervention and develop practical ways of applying IM to mitigate burnout. We will share tools including brief and simple interventions participants can use immediately (ie: patient handouts), intermediate approaches that require a moderate amount of training to employ (ie: teaching patients how to manage stress), and advanced systemic interventions (ie: IM educational consult clinic). Our goal is that each participant will leave our interactive session with a concrete plan to apply IM tools to improve patient care and build resilience for themselves and for others in their organization.

Collectively we bring years of experience in IM training, practice, and implementation. Individually we bring personal experiences with our own wellness & fostering provider wellness. We have expertise in medical residency education, clinical infrastructure, burnout work, & shifting culture towards a holistic approach to care for our vulnerable patients. We are skilled at making complex topics more digestible and facilitating group discussions.

burnout, self-care, resilience, hope, practical tools, clinical systems, building integrative clinics, integrative medicine training, residency, integrative medicine in primary care

Other or additional methods used (explain below)

Combination of presentation w/discussion + experimental workshop + working groups

This session is appropriate for all audiences and skill levels