• As part of The Point of Care programme’s work to improve patients’ experience of care in hospital, we wanted to look more closely at compassionate care: what it is, what prevents it and what enables staff day in day out to be compassionate towards every patient in their care.
• To look at this issue, The Point of Care team held a one-day workshop in November 2008, bringing together people who work in hospital (nurses, doctors, psychologists, chaplains, managers), along with experts who have either written on or researched the topic.
• Compassion is ‘a deep awareness of the suffering of another coupled with the wish to relieve it’; it includes honesty and may involve both courage and generosity – frequently requiring that caregivers give something of themselves.
• Workshop participants cited the following as factors that contribute to preventing compassion:
  • The natural, human defences staff develop to cope with their regular, frequent or in some cases continuous exposure to their fellow human beings in varying states of physical pain and distress, to suffering, terminal illness and death
  • Staff stress and burnout, which have their origins in different sources, both individual and situational
  • Conflict between perceptions of professionalism and compassion
  • Lack of systematic role modelling or mentoring
  • Training that emphasises professional detachment
• Workshop participants identified the following as approaches that might enable staff to consistently deliver compassionate care:
  • Personal experiences, first-person accounts and role-playing exercises help staff to better understand what it’s like to be a patient and may change their perceptions of their ability to shape the patient’s experiences of care.
  • Learning from the example of palliative care
  • Changing the physical environment
  • Providing staff with a forum for open and honest dialogue
  • Role modelling/mentoring
  • Careful implementation of the right kind of measures
  • Feeding back to staff on their performance

Robin Youngson speaking on compassion

Dr Robin Youngson, anaesthetist, founder of the Centre for Compassion in Health Care in New Zealand and spokesman for the World Health Organisation in the 2007 launch of the new strategy People at the centre of health care: harmonising mind, body and systems, spoke at a joint event with NHS Confederation at The King’s Fund last week.

In this interview, he outlines why he believes compassion is so important, where things have gone wrong, and how he believes doctors, and the organisations of which they’re a part, can put compassion at the heart of health care.

• Download the write up from this event: Has compassion got lost? Is state intevention an answer? (53 kb)