Compassion
True compassion means not only feeling another’s pain but also being moved to help relieve it Daniel Goleman First day at school nerves At the time of writing Google says that ‘compassion’ appeared in 160 news headlines in the last 24 hours. It is a rich and complex idea that is often seen as characteristic of our human best while its absence makes possible our worst. While compassion has long been widely regarded as an essential ingredient of effective care a definitional step is often missing. In 2007 in Nursing Forum Assistant Professor Maria Schantz wrote “the meaning of the concept “compassion” is neither clearly defined in nursing scholarship nor widely promoted in the context of contemporaneous everyday nursing practice” and continued on a sombre note “the term in its moral dimension has, at best, been downgraded as an optional practice in everyday nursing and care and, at worst, dismissed as lofty ideals connected to other disciplines, such as religi