Appreciative Practice at UVA
To “appreciate” means to value or to honor. The University of Virginia Center for Appreciative Practice was established to promote the appreciative practice of medicine. In appreciative practice, we celebrate and focus on the best in people and in the world around us. We affirm past and present strengths, successes, and potentials. We see and nurture those things that give life to an organization – caring, collaboration, health, vitality, and excellence. Our experience has shown that as individuals embody and integrate these values, they are better able to embrace caring attitudes toward their patients, students, and colleagues. This condition, the ability to practice appreciatively, is arrived at by experience, even discipline. Most importantly, the ability to practice appreciatively can be nurtured in practitioners and institutions. At the University of Virginia, we have made great strides in this regard, and these proposed activities would enable us to reach a broad, international health care community.
The UVACAP has evolved from a grassroots movement using appreciative inquiry methods to enhance patient care, teaching, and research at the University of Virginia. The Center’s mission is to promote appreciative practices in the care of patients, in the education and training of health care professionals, and to promote research into the effects of appreciative practice on patients, students, residents and staff. Appreciative Practice embodies the capacity for empathy, self-reflection, collaboration, and identifying strengths in one another. There are numerous ways to enhance these capabilities in clinicians and in the organization in which they function. The UVACAP is bringing together these programs and tools to engage them in the common goal of enhancing appreciative practice and studying its effects. We also hope that the Center will become the organizing focus for the international community of caregivers, educators, and researchers that are committed to enhancing caring attitudes among healthcare providers.
Examples of programs at our institution finding a home under the Appreciative Practice umbrella include Appreciative Inquiry, Family and Patient-Centered Care initiatives, our Humanities in Medicine Program, the Leadership in Academic Medicine faculty development program, the UVA Mindfulness Center, Reflective Writing, Healer’s Art, Spirituality in Medicine, Physician Wellness, the UVA Institute for Quality and Patient Safety, AI-based Quality Project, the Critical Incident Response Team, the Wisdom in Medicine project, and the UVA Academy of Distinguished Educators. These branches of innovation in teaching and practice have emerged and grown on their own; we believe that linking them together under the auspices of the UVACAP will have a significant synergistic effect in fostering caring attitudes, ensuring that they continue to flourish. More>> History
