Mindfulness Training Improves Attention and Reduces Rumination in Veterinary Medicine Students

A veterinary medical curriculum causes significant stress in students. Stressors that continue into veterinary practice include long work hours, lack of control over workload, emergencies, unexpected deaths, euthanasia, client grief, compassion fatigue, treatment failure, surgical challenges, difficult clients, interpersonal conflicts, and medical errors. These stressors put both veterinary students and practitioners at high risk for mental, physical and emotional fatigue, substance abuse and an increased risk of suicide compared to other health care professionals and the general population. We developed the Mindful Veterinary Practice (MVP) elective for third year veterinary students, based on the Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction and the Mindful Practice programs. We examined the hypothesis that mindfulness training enhances specific aspects of attentional functioning, as well as self-reported mood and trait-level mindfulness. We examined three functionally and neuroantomically distinct but overlapping attentional subsystems: alerting, orienting, and conflict monitoring by performance on the Attention Network Test (ANT). The mindfulness training group (N=17) participated in the 7-week MVP elective. Another group of students in the same academic cohort who received no training served as the control group (N=16). Groups were compared before (Time 1) and after (Time 2) delivery of the MVP course. At Time 1, the MVP and Control groups did not differ in any of our measures of interest. At Time 2, participants in the MVP but not the Control group demonstrated significantly improved conflict monitoring on the ANT and self-reported trait mindfulness, as well as reduced rumination. These results suggest that mindfulness training for veterinary students may help protect against attentional-lapses in their medical practice and protect against emotional states that may lead to burnout during their highly stressful professional training.

Trisha Dowling is a professor of veterinary pharmacology at the Western College of Veterinary Medicine. She is board certified in large animal internal medicine and veterinary clinical pharmacology. In 2010, she developed the Mindful Veterinary Practice course and teaches it to veterinary students and veterinarians.