Why

The aim of The Point of Care programme at The King’s Fund is to improve patients’ experience of care in hospital, and to help staff to deliver the sort of care that they would like for themselves and their own families.

The focus of The Point of Care programme is on care in acute hospitals, and our concern is with all health professionals, including support staff, who are directly or indirectly involved in caring for patients and their families.

In December 2008 we published a review paper to launch the programme, Seeing the Person in the Patient, which drew on available published research and our own qualitative research with patients, their families and staff.

We were aware that there were issues that we would have liked to explore more fully, either because they were complex, and we could not do justice to them in a short paper, or because good research is scarce.

We decided to hold a series of workshops, bringing people who work in hospital together with experts who have either written or researched the topic, or whose work means that they have particular insight.

The first area we chose to explore further was ‘compassion’. What prevents and what enables compassionate care, and how it can be provided day in day out, is a difficult and important subject, and one which we knew needed in-depth discussion.
 
The workshop, ‘Enabling compassion’, was held at The King’s Fund in November 2008.

Who came

We invited a range of professionals including hospital doctors, a junior doctor, a consultant anaesthetist , psychologists, a psychoanalyst, hospital chaplains, nurses and managers. We also invited academics and journalists who had written on compassion, or reflected on the difficulties of being compassionate. The workshop was prepared and led by Professor Jenny Firth-Cozens, a psychologist who has written, among other things, about medical training and careers, and the impacts of providing patient care on the mental and emotional wellbeing of healthcare professionals and other staff.

What we asked them to do

Before attending the workshop we asked participants to think of a time in the course of their work, or when they had been a patient (or a family member had been a patient), when they had been treated with compassion, or were able to treat someone else with compassion. We asked them to think about times when this had not happened and why that might have been. We asked them to write this down briefly and bring it with them to the workshop: these experiences were collected on the day anonymously and we are very grateful to them for taking part.

Jenny Firth-Cozens introduced workshop participants to a brief overview of the literature on compassion and the concepts related to it, such as what stops compassion, and the debate around whether compassion is innate or can be taught.

The workshop was highly interactive, with the day divided into three main discussion sessions, and a plenary to draw the themes together. Participants were asked to address the questions: What stops compassion? What enables compassion?