Mindfulness meditation introduced in a particular healthcare setting.
Research type
Research Study
Full title
What does Buddhism offer within the current context of healthcare chaplaincy and the broader provision of spiritual care?
IRAS ID
137142
Contact name
Andrew J Todd
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
Cardiff University(Research Governance)
Research summary
The theme of the research project is to ask what contribution Buddhism can make to healthcare chaplaincy, and to the broader provision of spiritual care, with some attention paid to implications for future practice? The study will have a clear focus on the emphasis on the central role that mindfulness practice plays within all schools of Buddhism, drawing particularly from textual sources and commentaries. \n\nThrough an understanding of the significance of the experience of mindfulness, and an examination of how mindfulness can be offered to patients within a secular context like the NHS, an evaluation will be made of how a faith, like Buddhism, can contribute to a richer provision of spiritual care.\n\nThe research will investigate the potential for making the benefits of mindfulness practices more widely accessible to patients within a specific area of healthcare in the UK; successes of this kind being well being documented within North American studies.\n\nThis study involves two strands of field work:\n- interviewing individual staff with experience of introducing mindfulness practices into healthcare settings; \n- carrying out a case study introducing mindfulness practices within the healthcare setting of Cardiology. The researcher, and a small number of nursing staff being trained by the researcher, will deliver mindfulness interventions to patients of any faith or of none. \n\nThe two strands enable models to be developed helping explore the processes of:\n- teaching / delivering mindfulness practices to patients, from the perspectives of both experienced and ’trainee’ mindfulness instructors’ reflection upon their delivery of an intervention; \n- learning and developing mindfulness practices, from the perspectives of both staff reflection upon their experience of ’training’ to be mindfulness teachers and patients reflection upon their experience of the ’healing’ process. \n\nThe study aims to evaluate how faith and clinical communities can learn from each other within a shared vision of holistic care.
REC name
East of England - Cambridgeshire and Hertfordshire Research Ethics Committee
REC reference
13/EE/0437
Date of REC Opinion
10 Dec 2013
REC opinion
Further Information Favourable Opinion