How Do Health Professionals Maintain Compassion Over Time? Insights From a Study of Compassion in Health

Abstract

Although compassion in healthcare differs in important ways from compassion in everyday life, it provides a key, applied microcosm in which the science of compassion can be applied. Compassion is among the most important virtues in medicine, expected from medical professionals and anticipated by patients. Yet, despite evidence of its centrality to effective clinical care, research has focused on compassion fatigue or barriers to compassion and neglected to study the fact that most healthcare professionals maintain compassion for their patients. In contributing to this understudied area, the present report provides an exploratory investigation into how healthcare professionals report trying to maintain compassion. In the study, 151 professionals were asked questions about how they maintained compassion for their patients. Text responses were coded, with a complex mixture of internal vs. external, self vs. patient, and immediate vs. general strategies being reported. Exploratory analyses revealed reliable individual differences in the tendency to report strategies of particular types but no consistent age-related differences between older and younger practitioners emerged. Overall, these data suggest that while a range of compassion-maintaining strategies were reported, strategies were typically concentrated in particular areas and most professionals seek to maintain care using internal strategies. A preliminary typology of compassion maintaining strategies is proposed, study limitations and future directions are discussed, and implications for the study of how compassion is maintained are considered.

Level of compassionate health care service provision and its associated factors among health professionals working in public hospitals of Addis Ababa: health professionals’ perspective

“…For instance, in America, 85% of patients and 78% physicians believed that compassionate health care contributes to good clinical outcomes [ 6 ]. The available evidence also showed that patients anticipated companionate care from clinicians [ 7 , 8 ]. In America, 87% of patients preferred kind treatment form health care professionals and 90% of American patients switched to kinder health care professionals [ 2 ].…”

From a View of the Hospital as a System to a View of the Suffering Patient

“…Where Do We Go From Here? Practice Implications for Bridging the Gap Hospital care must move beyond ideology and declared values to an evidence-based PCC (67). The implementation of PCC should be across all levels, from compassionate clinicians who employ strategies of compassion to decision making of hospital directors.…”

The Mediating Role of Compassion between Social Job Resources, and Healthy Healthcare Professionals: A Cross-Sectional Study with Gender Perspective

“…Despite this interest, there is a lack of research emphasising its role as a personal resource and how it can make job resources available in the healthcare context for HCPs. Compassion in medical care has received increasing attention from the health promotion literature, health care policy and professional organisations in recent years [ 20 ], and interest in Compassion towards others has also increased due to its positive impact on the health of patients [ 21 ].…”