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 religion and ethics”.

In June 2015 the Journal of Clinical Nursing published a study showing that people judged whether practitioners were compassionate or not by their style of communication: whether time was invested in developing a positive interpersonal relationship. 


Care given without personal engagement was viewed as noncompassionate. Authors Rosie Kneafsey, Sarah Brown, Kim Sein, Carol Chamley and Joanne Parsons suggested that for “Institutions implementing ‘values- based’ recruitment processes, a clearer understanding of this core concept is vital” and I have to agree with them.

When we go out looking for people to work with us in any field that requires a capacity for compassion we need to both be able to explain what we mean by that, and then design an organisational culture which engenders that kind of personal presence. Dr Joan Halifax writing for the Journal of Pain and Symptom Management in 2011 says from her research that “empathy, positive regard for others, kindness, and insight form a basis for compassion”. She also cautions that to be compassionate comes at a personal cost and those providing care and support to others need also to be supported themselves.

Reading all this stuff about compassion prompted me to go back to the six core values of Wellbeing Teams which Helen Sanderson and I developed together well over a year ago now. The first value is….. (you guessed it) Compassion: by which we mean “actively hearing and sensing anothers thoughts and feelings, being kind, and finding empathetic ways to support individuals and each other to achieve positive outcomes”. Phew - we have intuitively picked up on and included the vital elements revealed by Joan but what about the providing care and support bit? 

Well, there are shades of that care and support contained within the meanings of a number of the other values including Responsibility ‘ways of working that dignify everyone’ and Collaboration ‘cooperating with others’. The vital piece of the puzzle, however, is the sixth value: Flourishing which means ‘creating the conditions for thriving that reflect aspirations, remove barriers to connection and ensure people choose their own way forward’. It is this spirit of seeking the best we can for everyone concerned that seems to resonate strongly for folk in recruitment and selection and then is actively brought to life through induction and beyond. This is a positive story of social care and human beings at their best and there’s always a place in the world for another one of these.

“My mission in life is not merely to survive, but to thrive; and to do so with some passion, some compassion, some humour and some style.”

 Maya Angelou