Abstract
Compassion in healthcare has received significant attention recently, on an international scale, with concern raised about its absence during clinical interactions. As a concept, compassionate care has been linked to nursing. We examined historical discourse on this topic, to understand and situate current debates on compassionate care as a hallmark of high‐quality services. Documents we looked at illustrated how responsibility for delivering compassionate care cannot be consigned to individual nurses. Health professionals must have the right environmental circumstances to be able to provide and engage in compassionate interactions with patients and their relatives. Hence, although compassionate care has been presented as a straightforward solution when crisis faces health services, this discourse, especially in policy documents, has often failed to acknowledge the system‐level issues associated with its provision. This has resulted in simplistic presentations of ‘compassion’ as inexpensive and the responsibility of individual nurses, a misleading proposal that risks devaluing the energy and resources required to deliver compassionate care. It also overlooks the need for organisations, not just individuals, to be charged with upholding its provision.
Highlights
Recent research involving nursing, midwifery and care staff found that this policy is something that features in the working lives of senior staff but is outside the awareness of those attending directly to patients’ needs (O’Driscoll, Allan, Liu, Corbett, & Serrant, 2018); the study reported that this policy was regarded by participating nurses and midwives as a top-down initiative, which failed to acknowledge the structural barriers they faced that affected their ability to provide compassionate care
Professionals, politicians and the media have called for compassionate care most vocally when health services are perceived to be in crisis
Categorising it in this way fails to acknowledge the emotional and practical resources required to make compassionate care a reality; it overlooks the role everyone working in healthcare, including managers and leaders, plays in reaching this goal, and risks reducing the provision of compassionate care to a task completed by individuals rather than an ethos to be embraced and supported by an organisation
Summary
Funding information This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors. However, Roberta Bivins holds a Wellcome Trust Senior Investigator Award, grant number 104837/Z/14/Z (title ‘The Cultural History of the NHS’).
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