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.
Highlights
Compassion is one of the most important virtues in medicine, expected from medical professionals and anticipated by patients (Frampton et al, 2013; Fernando and Consedine, 2014a)
Given evidence for compassion’s centrality to effective clinical care and the benefits it holds for patients, practitioners, and the healthcare system, the objectives of the current study were to (a) preliminarily identify and characterize the strategies medical professionals use to maintain compassion for their patients, and (b) explore potential developmental variation in such strategies
Coding categories were based on three considerations: (a) the five elements of compassion proposed by Strauss et al (2016) and the influences on care posited in the Transactional Model of Physician Compassion (Fernando and Consedine, 2014a), (b) the content of the responses from participants, and (c) guidance from academics and Ethnicity New Zealander British European Asian Other Age Physicians Nurses Psychologists Other Gender Females Males Profession Physicians Nurses Psychologists Other n (% or SD)
Summary
Compassion is one of the most important virtues in medicine, expected from medical professionals and anticipated by patients (Frampton et al, 2013; Fernando and Consedine, 2014a). Maintaining Physician Compassion (Fernando and Consedine, 2014b) This is a promising digression from the compassion fatigue framework, studies have not yet investigated how medical professionals maintain compassion for their patients. Coding Self-Reported Strategies to Maintain Compassion In this preliminary investigation of the processes by which medical professionals maintain compassion for their patients, respondents were asked two, open-ended questions. Coding categories were based on three considerations: (a) the five elements of compassion proposed by Strauss et al (2016) and the influences on care posited in the Transactional Model of Physician Compassion (Fernando and Consedine, 2014a), (b) the content of the responses from participants, and (c) guidance from academics and Variable
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