“Less stress, more competence”: self-care, communicative competence, quality of life and professional medical action

The tension between physical and mental self-care, quality of life and highly professional behavior represents a major challenge for physicians and medical students, as complexity, acceleration and task intensification characterize their professional and personal everyday lives. The health burden on physicians and students can have a significant impact on medical practice and is a cause for concern worldwide. In 2017, they prompted the World Medical Association to include medical self-care in the revised Geneva Declaration. The German Medical Association placed the health of physicians at the focus at the annual meeting in 2019. The graduated program, which has been developed since 2018 at the Institute of General Medicine in Magdeburg, is based on the ReSource project of the Max Planck Society as well as the National Competence-Based Learning Goals Catalog for Medicine (NKLM). The “Magdeburg Mindfulness Modules (MAM)” program is intended to support medical students and future specialists, as well as active medical colleagues as part of further training, to face these challenges even more effectively. The state of research, getting to know the mindfulness-based techniques underlying the MAM program, which help physicians and students in their physical and psychological presence, in maintaining self-care, empathy and (self-)compassion, in dealing with difficult feelings as well as in can effectively support medical communication, as well as the possible uses of mindfulness-based techniques in patient care are the subject of the workshop.

Markus Herrmann (Prof Dr. med., MPH, M.A.)