Why compassion is important in healthcare

Ultimate Medical Academy understands the need for quality patient and customer care and the importance of continued improvement in that area. For over 26 years, UMA has offered comprehensive, accredited healthcare education to students who go on to serve in a variety patient care roles. Though gaining knowledge as a student is where it starts, we recognize that incorporating compassion and empathy in what you do as a healthcare professional goes a long way in cultivating a positive experience for patients.

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While we do not yet know whether these or other strategies are actually effective in maintaining compassion in healthcare settings, providing professionals with an array of options to strengthen or supplement the approaches they typically use is a useful starting point for both research and practice. Identifying age-related variation has the potential to identify the strategies that accumulated experience suggests are effective in maintaining compassion over time and thus provide targets for medical education as well as compassion-enhancing interventions.

In this preliminary study, however, age related differences in self-reported strategy use were not evidenced in either differences in the reporting of specific strategies or in the proportion of different types of strategy.

Given developmental trends where compassion fatigue and the barriers to compassion appear to lower with age Dev et al. Indeed, the possibility that there is something to learn from the compassion-maintaining strategies that are time-tested in the repertoire of more experienced physicians remains worth pursuing.

Age brings with it a wealth of psychological changes e. More experienced practitioners report lower barriers to compassion and prior work has shown that a history of past adversity albeit not necessarily health-related can enhance compassionate responding under some conditions Lim and DeSteno, Given the implications for selection and training in the health workforce, direct examination of this possibility in the context of health is an important future direction for applied compassion research.

The present study provides novel insight into the range of strategies health professionals from a range of specialities employ when seeking to maintain compassion as well as the breadth of strategies employed. Although it represents a useful beginning to work in an area with almost no research, there are several limitations that should be borne in mind.

First, the sample was self-selected from a group of professionals enrolled to attend the Compassion in Healthcare Conference in New Zealand, March Although this sample was professionally diverse, those electing to attend this event likely differ from the general population of professionals. Potentially exaggerating self-selection biases is the fact that a direct invitation from study organizers was used.

Although participation was anonymous, compassion studies in medicine are prone to bias Fernando et al. Thus, the sample may either be or present as kinder, more aware of the role of compassion in their work, or be more likely to report particular strategies such as mediation, reference to shared humanity and the like.

Equally, the large proportion of self-focused strategies may reflect the phrasing of the specific questions that were asked. Although self-report is likely a necessary first step in this area, such considerations mean the relative frequency with which different types of compassion-maintaining strategies are used among healthcare providers more widely remains unclear.

As importantly, degrees of clinical experience were only indirectly measured via self-reported age. In a similar vein, it is possible that there may be particular aspects of clinical experience that are relevant or that working in different clinical environments lends itself to the use of particular strategies.

Perhaps most importantly, however, this study does not provide evidence that these self-reported strategies are actually effective in maintaining compassion. The fact that strategies are subjectively experienced as helping maintain compassion seems clear but research has yet empirically determine whether subjectively useful strategies translate into a patients experience of greater care.

Mindfulness, for example, which was mentioned by a significant minority of participants in this study, has complex links with feelings of compassion as well as with compassionate behavior Fernando et al. If the study of compassion in medicine is to further the deployment of compassion-enhancing strategies into education and professional practice it must move beyond ideology, values, and appearance to become an evidence-based agenda.

Empirical study evaluating the efficacy of particular strategies is clearly warranted. In contributing to this critical applied area of compassion research, the present study presents a first attempt at identifying and descriptively characterizing the strategies health professionals report using as a means to maintain compassion.

While some strategies were focused on the patient, these data suggest that self-focused strategies predominate. In turn, such a pattern suggests that self-care is seen as central to the capacity to maintain care for others, something also evident in other writings Sanchez-Reilly et al. That said, a significant proportion of the strategies reported were patient-focused, emphasizing empathy, shared humanity, and connecting with patients.

Overall, these descriptive data provide initial grounds for moving research beyond a focus on the factors that may interfere with compassion to include the study of the processes that may enhance and sustain it over time. The datasets presented in this article are not readily available because: participants consented to participate with the understanding that access to data would be restricted to the named researchers.

Requests to access the datasets should be directed to NC, n. The studies involving human participants were reviewed and approved by the Human Participants Ethics Committee, University of Auckland. AF and NC designed the study and collected the data. SB and VD developed the coding system and coded the data.

SB analyzed the data and drafted the initial manuscript. NC oversaw all elements of the project and edited drafts. All authors provided feedback on manuscript drafts and have approved the final version of the manuscript. The organizers receive no compensation from this event and any profits are administered in the service of compassion research by the host university. The remaining authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

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Relationships Res. Empathic processes during nurse—consumer conflict situations in psychiatric inpatient units: a qualitative study. Health Nurs. Gilbert, P. Google Scholar. They have developed the Transactional Model of Physician Compassion to demonstrate this. Other researchers have also recognised the lack of an empirically based model of compassion, and that patient views have been under-researched.

In a study that defined and codified the core elements of compassion from the perspective of patients at the end of life, researchers provided an empirical foundation for the development of a compassion inventory to measure patients' experiences of compassion.

From this, the researchers developed a model that contextualises practitioner compassion in the relationship with the patient, and identifies virtues as underpinning compassion, hereby differentiating it from empathy or sympathy. In one study, methods suggested by physicians to being compassionate without becoming overwhelmed were to:. It will deplete us.

But we're sitting on a goldmine in terms of our own self-care. If you reflect daily on the number of people you've helped or attempted to help, then you'll feel good, and realise it's worth the effort. Research suggests that inherent qualities of compassion can be further developed through education and training, but that education must be aligned with changes in clinical practice to sustain compassionate care.

A scoping review of healthcare literature on compassion over the past 25 years found that clinical mentors, reflective practice, and experiential learning have been identified as effective teaching methods. The study also found that beyond demonstrating the externalised features of compassion, effective compassion training engages the inherent qualities and virtues of students, and that reflective learning and self-awareness seem to be particularly important teaching methods, as compassion is highly individualised to students and their patients — personalized healthcare that is customized to both clinicians and patients.

A review of compassion training programmes and the evidence for them found that the most researched was compassion-focused therapy. Compassion-focused therapy is a system of psychotherapy developed by Paul Gilbert that integrates techniques from cognitive behavioural therapy with concepts from evolutionary psychology, social psychology, developmental psychology, Buddhist psychology, and neuroscience to teach the skills and attributes of compassion.

Lown used a social neuroscience approach to develop a compassion process model and framework with examples of educational goals, interventions and resources for curriculum development. Mindfulness-based compassion training has also been shown to increase compassion, including in a landmark study of primary care physicians.