We got the chance to speak with Gillian Cilibrasi and Lisa Sunshine of the Urban Zen Foundation Integrative Therapy Program and then join me as I talk to nurses Liz Lattuga, Patti Heidmann, Jennifer Owens, and Debra Cappock-Clegg, all recent winners of the Johnson & Johnson Campaign for Nursing’s Future/Urban Zen Integrative Therapy program nurse scholarship.

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Jamie:     We’ll start off with you, Lisa, tell us a little bit about your background.

Lisa:    My background is in creating awareness for non-profit campaigns. My first one was the ONE Campaign for Bono and I come to Urban Zen which is Donna Karan’s fashion designers non-profit organization. Together Gillian and I work with – Donna’s created a program that trains nurses, allied health care workers and people from the Yoga community in a variety of Eastern Healing modalities. My function is to let people know what we’re doing and how to get involved.

Jamie:    Gillian, how about you?

Gillian:    Well, I’m the program director for the Urban Zen Integrative Therapy Program. My background is a combination of business and healing health care workers. So I’ve been a body worker and massage therapist in the state of New York for more than 15 years and I have a strong Yoga background and went through the program myself and liked [unintelligible] involved and that’s how I became the program director.

Jamie:    Let’s talk a little bit about what the Urban Zen Integrative Therapy program is. What do you expect when a health care professional comes in and takes the type of a training? What do you want them to learn and take away from it?

Gillian:    What we do is we train in five different modalities. We trained them modalities with yoga therapy, essential oil therapy, Reiki – which is a form of energy work that can be done hands-on or hands-off, and we train contemplative care or [unintelligible] practices and in nutrition. We use those modalities to create if you will a tool belt so that a health care professional has other options – non-pharmacological options – to deal with the system of disease and we call that the “PANIC model”: Pain, anxiety, nausea, insomnia, constipation and exhaustion. So they become adept in using the different modalities to address those individual issues. So if there’s a patient in pain, they’ve got some other options whether it’s movement in bed or some breath awareness or use of essential oils. They have other options other than just strictly pharmacological approaches.

Jamie:    I’m excited as a nurse to hear about using some alternative therapies just because as a nurse I know that patients don’t always respond well to traditional medicine and can sometimes really benefit from alternative types of therapies to relax them, to decrease anxiety, to remove focus from pain and reduce their levels of perceived pain. What are you excited about as far as getting some of these nurses involved in this specific type of training?

Gillian:     Well, one of the things we’ve already seen is – the first part of our program is really a self-care component, how to take care of themselves. We all know that things like burnout or compassion fatigue are something that all nurses have, all healthcare professionals, can come across in their careers. The first portion of the program is really about training these nurses to take care of themselves. We’ve seen immediate action. They’re taking action to be better, to be healthier in the way that they approach life and approach their work with the sense of balance and mindfulness.