| A study of correlation was conducted at the Ochsner Clinic in Southeast Louisiana to explore the potential relationship between medical providers’ self-reported mindfulness and patient’s self-reported patient satisfaction. Over 600 medical providers were mailed the Freiberg Mindfulness Inventory (FMI) and 117 were returned. Patient satisfaction data by medical provider was collected previously be the sponsoring organization using the Press-Ganey patient satisfaction tool which is one of the most widely used instruments in the healthcare industry (Clark, Maxwell, & Malone, 2003).;Mindfulness was defined as, “a focus/awareness in the present, suspension of judgment, openness to novelty/curiosity, acceptance, de-centered identity/reduction of ego, and a perspective of impermanence (Langer, 2000; Bishop, et al., 2004; Thich, 1999). The definition for patient satisfaction used was, “the extent to which the patients’ expectations of service performance were met or exceeded during their medical provider encounter (Eriksen, 1995).”;The primary hypothesis: H1: “Self-reported mindfulness of medical providers will correlate positively with self-reported patient satisfaction,” was accepted. The statistical analysis uncovered that a total of 23 significant correlations existed between patient satisfaction and mindfulness at the .01 and .05 level. However, most of these correlations exhibited modest Pearson correlation values of .250 or lower indicating that the strength of relationship between these correlations was weak. Several other hypothesis tested correlations between questions in the mindfulness and patient satisfaction surveys. |
