Abstract
Compassion is a complex process that is innate, determined in part by individual traits, and modulated by a myriad of conscious and unconscious factors, immediate context, social structures and expectations, and organizational "culture." Compassion is an ethical foundation of healthcare and a widely shared value; it is not an optional luxury in the healing process. While the interrelations between individual motivation and social structure are complex, we can choose to act individually and collectively to remove barriers to the innate compassion that most healthcare professionals bring to their work. Doing so will reduce professional burnout, improve the well-being of the healthcare workforce, and facilitate our efforts to achieve the triple aim of improving patients' experiences of care and health while lowering costs.
Highlights
Fotaki, arguing for the importance of making compassion an ethical foundation of healthcare in her recent editorial, makes the critical point that only an approach that acknowledges the interrelation between individual motivation and social structure can serve as the foundation of compassion-based ethics of care.[4]
Fotaki suggests, encouraging and educating individuals to provide compassionate care is insufficient in environments and organizations in which administrators, managers and healthcare professionals are focused on cutting costs, meeting performance targets unrelated to patients’ health and well-being, and sustaining the organization’s productivity rather than focusing on the essential aims of healthcare – promoting health and well-being, curing disease when possible, managing illness, and healing always
These include a commitment by organizational leaders and managers to allocate resources and set policies that focus on the needs of patients, families, and caregivers themselves, for compassion and healing relationships; a commitment to educate healthcare professionals and the public about the characteristics and skills of compassionate care; to value and recognize compassionate caregivers and organizations; to partner with and learn from patients and families; to create flexible performance improvement processes in order to implement and continuously improve compassion in care; to deepen our understanding of the nature of compassion and its impacts through research and measurement; and to support healthcare professionals and staff to manage the psychological and emotional stress of providing care so that they are able to act with compassion rather than experiencing personal or
Summary
While the interrelations between individual motivation and social structure are complex, we can choose to act individually and collectively to remove barriers to the innate compassion that most healthcare professionals bring to their work.
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