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Mindfulness: Creating the Space for Compassionate Care

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 December 2015

Larissa Blewitt
Affiliation:
University of Sydney Business School, University of Sydney, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia
Karyn Wang
Affiliation:
University of Sydney Business School, University of Sydney, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia
Helena Nguyen
Affiliation:
University of Sydney Business School, University of Sydney, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia
Anya Johnson*
Affiliation:
University of Sydney Business School, University of Sydney, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia
Kreshma Pidial
Affiliation:
Department of Psychology, University of New South Wales, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia
Nickolas Yu
Affiliation:
Staff Wellness and Patient & Family-Centred Care, Sydney Local Health District, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia
*
Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Anya Johnson, University of Sydney Business School, University of Sydney, Sydney, New South Wales, 2006Australia. E-mail: anya.johnson@sydney.edu.au

Extract

Hyland, Lee, and Mills (2015) open a door for discussing the benefits, utility, and challenges of mindfulness at work. Although it is evident from Hyland and colleagues that mindfulness can minimize negative employee outcomes (such as the experience of stress, strain, and burnout) and promote cognitive functioning, there seems to be limited consideration of how mindfulness actively promotes employee growth, development, high performance, and engagement. In this commentary, we speak to how mindfulness can encourage positive well-being at work in a hospital context. Specifically, we consider how mindfulness programs are currently being used in the ongoing training and development of nurses to cultivate patient-centered compassionate care. We propose that mindfulness can encourage positive well-being and compassionate care via the cultivation of resources and the creation of resource gain spirals, and we provide preliminary evidence for the utility of mindfulness training in hospital care settings.

Type
Commentaries
Copyright
Copyright © Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology 2015 

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