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Friday, April 12, 2013
Learning Objective 1: describe strategy for incorporating self-care content and instruction into the nursing course
Learning Objective 2: discuss the hypothesized effect of self-care practice on perceived stress and mindfulness in accelerated nursing students
Extreme stress can impair learning and performance ultimately affecting, not only the accelerated nursing student, but also clinical decisions and communications. The purpose of this project was to replicate and substantially expand an evaluation of a curricular addition: experiential exposure to self-care modalities like yoga, aromatherapy, Reiki and mindful breathing based on the Urban Zen Integrative Therapy (UZIT) program. The goal was to help students regulate stress, gain a more mindful awareness of self and others, and increase their knowledge of complimentary therapies. Findings from an earlier pilot, suggested that mind-body self-care supported students' ability to regulate their experience of stress throughout the semester. With this project, we addressed limitations of the pilot by including accelerated nursing students from three universities. During spring 2012 mind-body self-care modalities were introduced into the first semester curriculum in two of the universities (Time 1 n=50). The comparison group at the third university was only given an educational pamphlet on stress management, (Time 1 n=63). Using a quasi-experimental design, we collected data at the beginning, middle, and end of the semester and beginning of the fall semester using Health Promoting Lifestyle Profile II, Perceived Stress Scale, and Mindful Attention Awareness Scale. We hypothesized that students who participated in mind-body self-care practice 1) perceived less stress and had a greater capacity for mindful attention from the beginning to end of the semester, 2) perceived less stress and more mindfulness at the end of the semester compared to students in the control group, and 3) sustained changes in stress and mindfulness at the beginning of the Fall 2012 semester. We will use descriptive statistics to describe the sample, determine reliability of measures, and examine baseline differences between the groups. The mean differences between and within groups, while controlling for HPLP II, will be tested using RM-ANCOVA.