The importance of providing compassionate care to patients is well established. While compassionate care can be understood as an individual response to others' vulnerability, it is acknowledged that healthcare environments can impact significantly on this aspect of practice. This study sought to explore how health professionals and pre-qualifying healthcare students (HCS) understand compassionate care and factors that hinder or enable them to practice compassionately. The perceptions of health professionals (n=146) and HCS (n=166) registered at a university in Northwest England were explored using mixed methods. This article reports on the data gained from the qualitative interviews and responses to open-text questions from the mainly quantitative questionnaire. The findings are discussed under the following themes: individual and relationship factors that impact on compassionate care practice; organisational factors that impact on the clinical environment and team; and leadership factors that hinder or enable a compassionate care culture. This article argues that there are a number of enabling factors that enhance a culture conducive to providing compassionate care. These include leaders who act as positive role models, good relationships between team members and a focus on staff wellbeing.
This model of using volunteers to embed strategy and policy could potentially be used in other areas of clinical practice and indeed in other countries.
a programme of dissemination events and examples of good practice in the form of case studies have been valuable tools to engage nursing, midwifery and care staff across health and social care. Continuing to establish networks of frontline staff engaging with LCAV and supporting each other will help facilitate best practice sharing, and multi-professional and cross-boundary working.
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