Learning Objectives

By the time they graduate, residents will be able to:

• Reflect upon and articulate their personal beliefs and how those beliefs influence their healing encounters. Beliefs regarding topics such as aging, disease, death, and the meaning of suffering will be among those explored.
• Assess their own self-care practices and create their own personal care plans.
• Create spiritually-aware and culturally-appropriate care plans for their patients.
• Establish and maintain ongoing dialog with a mentor or mentors regarding issues surrounding self-care and what gives them a sense of meaning and purpose.
• Cultivate mindfulness, self-awareness, and greater insight into interpersonal relationships. This will be done through:
  • Guided retreats
  • Training in Mindfulness Meditation
  • Seminars on self-care, ethics, cultural sensitivity, and spirituality and the health professions
• Review, articulate, and re-evaluate the underlying ideals that led them to choose medicine as their calling.
• Explain the central tenets of a diverse array of belief systems and describe how they shape patients’ expectations, medical decision making, and understanding of the meaning of suffering, disease, and death.
• Articulate key ethical issues in medical care, bringing their personal experiences into discussions.
• Access and work cooperatively with community and hospital resources, including chaplaincy services and non-physician healers, to facilitate more appropriate spiritually-grounded and culturally-informed care.
• Explain research findings related to how spirituality and culture affect medical outcomes, including recent studies of distant healing, how religious and cultural factors affect morbidity and mortality, and the healing benefits of forgiveness, meditation, and stress-reduction.
• Provide optimal end-of-life care.
• Experience a learning environment that makes meeting these objectives enjoyable, engaging, and relevant.