The Impact of Adding Art Therapy to a Mindfulness Enhancement Training with a Medical Student

Healthcare professionals play an important role in the delivery of high-quality patient care. The medical students of today are the physicians of tomorrow, although medical student training is notably challenging. Increased rates of suicidal ideation and self-reported distress during medical school training have been identified in the literature. Mindfulness-based interventions have been explored with various populations, including medical students. Mindfulness-based art therapy interventions have also been found to be effective among various populations; however, no study has explored the impact of adding art to mindfulness enhancement training with medical students specifically. This is the first study to investigate the impact of adding art to mindfulness enhancement training with a medical student. Results from this study found mindfulness-based art therapy had a moderate effect on mindfulness scores. Mindfulness-based art therapy also demonstrated a slight, though not significant, increase in sense of coherence scores. Results indicated the medical student found mindfulness practice with art and without art equally helpful in promoting mindfulness. Materials identified as helpful in promoting mindfulness were chalk pastels, watercolor, graphite pencils, and tissue paper. Analysis of results suggest mindfulness based-art therapy may be used to increase mindfulness and sense of coherence in medical students. Further research is necessary and this study presents implications for future research and practice in art therapy

FlexLast: An IT-Centric Solution for Balancing the Electric Power Grid

Abstract—How can energy from renewable sources be integrated in large quantities into the power supply without overwhelming the grid? A collaboration between BKW, the electric utility in the Canton of Bern, IBM, Migros, Switzerland’s largest retailer and supermarket chain, and Swissgrid, the national grid operator is creating a unique solution that applies advanced algorithms to data on the state of the grid and large freezer warehouses to optimize and manage the consumption of power for cooling to help balance the grid. In this paper we describe the architecture of the system and examine the business case required to make this approach feasible. Keywords—smart grid; demand response; balancing power; energy data analytics; ICT for grid management; I

The generative potential of mess in community-based participatory research with young people who use(d) drugs in Vancouver

Abstract Community-based participatory research (CBPR) is increasingly standard practice for critical qualitative health research with young people who use(d) drugs in Vancouver, Canada. One aim of CBPR in this context is to redress the essentialization, erasure, and exploitation of people who use(d) drugs in health research. In this paper, we reflect on a partnership that began in 2018 between three university researchers and roughly ten young people (ages 17–28) who have current or past experience with drug use and homelessness in Greater Vancouver. We focus on moments when our guiding principles of shared leadership, safety, and inclusion became fraught in practice, forcing us in some cases to re-imagine these principles, and in others to accept that certain ethical dilemmas in research can never be fully resolved. We argue that this messiness can be traced to the complex and diverse positionalities of each person on our team, including young people. As such, creating space for mess was ethically necessary and empirically valuable for our CBPR project.Medicine, Faculty ofOther UBCNon UBCMedicine, Department ofReviewedFacultyResearche