Enabling compassionate care in acute hospital settings

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.

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 subjects that we would have liked to explore more fully but could not do so (either because they were complex, and we could not do justice to them in a short paper, or because good research is scarce). We therefore decided to hold a series of workshops, bringing people who work in hospital together with experts who have either written or researched a particular issue.

'Enabling Compassion', was the first workshop in the series, and was intended to gain insight into what prevents and what enables compassionate care - a difficult and fascinating subject, and one that we knew needed more in-depth discussion than had been possible in our review paper.