Why this work
What if the stimulus is a career in medicine?
Across a professional lifetime, clinicians encounter uncertainty, responsibility, beauty, grief, technical challenge, and profound human connection.
Many recognise another experience -
a growing gap between the medicine they hoped to practise and the medicine that circumstances sometimes allow.
Over time, clinicians may find themselves feeling disconnected from the values, relationships, and sources of meaning that first drew them into medicine.
These experiences deserve careful attention.
Rather than asking only how clinicians cope, we ask another question:
"Between stimulus and response there is a space."
How might clinicians continue to live medicine well?
That question continues to shape everything we do.
Our approach
Three practices guide our work.
Remembering
Returning to the intentions and values that first drew us into medicine, while allowing them to continue evolving.
Noticing
Paying attention to aspects of practice that often go unseen.
Connecting
Creating conversations in which clinicians discover they are not alone.
Not techniques to master.
Practices of attention.
“It made me realise that a sense of belonging had been a bit missing for me.
Then, at the same time, helped me reclaim one.”
Oncologist, Belonging in Medicine workshop participant
Place
Flourishing is always situated.
We practise on lands cared for over many thousands of years by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.
We acknowledge their enduring relationship with Country, and the ways of attending, belonging, relationship, and care that continue to deepen our understanding.
We seek to learn respectfully from these traditions while recognising the many histories that have brought people to this continent.
Affiliation
Flourishing in Medicine Australia is led by Ross Carne as Honorary Director and is developing as an Australian expression of the international Flourishing in Medicine community.
We are affiliated with the University of Rochester Mindful Practice in Medicine network as a Centre of Excellence, and value this relationship as a source of friendship, scholarship, and shared inquiry.
As this work develops, we are listening carefully to clinicians, educators, and health services across Australia while contributing an Australian perspective within this international community.
Ross Carne
I am a neurologist, clinical neurophysiologist, educator, and writer based in Melbourne.
For many years I found myself returning to one question:
How do clinicians remain fully alive to their work?
That question led me towards mindfulness-based practice, narrative medicine, reflective writing, and the medical humanities.
Flourishing in Medicine Australia grew from that exploration.
I hope it becomes a place where clinicians continue asking these questions together.
Background
I am a certified teacher of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) and a certified facilitator in the University of Rochester's Mindful Practice in Medicine (MPIM) program. I have facilitated reflective practice, mindfulness, and narrative medicine programs for medical students, clinicians, and healthcare teams over many years.
My work also draws upon appreciative inquiry, Clean Language, reflective writing, and the medical humanities.