Clinician Wellness—Self-Care for Staying Healthy: Narrative Medicine for Optimizing Well-Being and as an Antidote to Stress and Burnout

Patient Benefits

Narrative Medicine connects all aspects of Integrative Medicine. ⁴ There is emerging data that expressive writing, drawing, speaking, singing, and listening about meaningful experiences improves patient health, reduces symptoms, ⁵ eases emotional discomfort, ^{6 –8} increases oxytocin, ⁹ and creates deepened connection. ¹⁰ The stories patients tell about themselves and to themselves can shift the narrative through neural re-narrating, gaining agency, purpose, and well-being.

Healthcare System Benefits

Medical trainees with narrative medicine training have improved history taking skills, communication skills, and patient centered care. ¹¹ Clinical teams have noted improvements in teamwork cohesion, interprofessional education, communication, and collaboration possibly due to improved skills of reflection, perspective-taking, and relationship building. ^{12 –14}

Clinician Benefits

Health care providers are at high-risk for professional and personal burnout due to the constant demands of caring for others, high standards of practice, productivity and record keeping, pressures to meet goals of patients and co-workers, schedules, time constraints, and family caregiving responsibilities. ¹⁵

Narrative Medicine not only benefits patients, medical trainees, and hospital centers, but also strongly enhances clinician well-being, empathy, and purpose. ^{16 –19} Through the process of reflection and shared storytelling, narrative medicine reduces burnout/compassion fatigue, ²⁰ preserves empathy, enhances self-awareness, increases emotional regulation and tolerance for ambiguity, ²¹ and helps process grief and trauma. ²²

A study looking at reducing physician burnout ²³ identified four factors associated with lower risk: empathy, self-compassion, quality of life, and CCC (confidence in providing compassionate care). These four factors are all potentially improved by Narrative Medicine. Another study showed that including Narrative Medicine along with other tools to build nurturing environments within a large academic hospital center resulted in improving the mean score of distress among physicians, a reduction in burnout, and improved well-being. ²⁴

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