The All with You® method has made the development of compassionate communities and cities possible, aligning organizations and cities to promote compassionate acts, and to start creating networks involved in a global community united by a vocation for caring.

Purpose of review Compassion has been recognized as a key aspect of high-quality healthcare, particularly in palliative care. This article provides a general review of the current understanding of compassion in palliative care and summarizes emergent compassionate initiatives in palliative care at three interdependent levels: compassion for patients, compassion in healthcare professionals, and compassionate communities at the end of life. Recent findings Compassion is a constructive response to suffering that enhances treatment outcomes, fosters the dignity of the recipient, and provides self-care for the giver. Patients and healthcare professionals value compassion and perceive a general lack of compassion in healthcare systems. Compassion for patients and for professionals’ self-care can be trained and implemented top-down (institutional policies) and bottom-up (compassion training). ‘Compassionate communities’ is an important emerging movement that complements regular healthcare and social services with a community-level approach to offer compassionate care for people at the end of life. Summary Compassion can be enhanced through diverse methodologies at the organizational, professional, and community levels. This enhancement of compassion has the potential to improve quality of palliative care treatments, enhance healthcare providers’ satisfaction, and reduce healthcare costs.

In the last decade, we have seen a growth of Compassionate Communities and Cities (CCC) at the end of life. There has been an evolution of organizations that help construct Community-Based Palliative Care programs. The objective is to analyze the implementation, methodology and effectiveness of the CCC models at the end of life. We conducted a systematic review following PRISMA ScR Guideline. The protocol was registered on PROSPERO (CRD42017068501). Five databases (MEDLINE, EMBASE, Web of Science, CINAHL and Google Scholar) were searched for studies (from 2000 to 2018) using set eligibility criteria. Three reviewers screened full-texts articles and extracted study data. Outcomes were filled in a registration form which included a narrative synthesis of each article. We screened 1975 records. We retrieved 112 articles and included 31 articles for the final analysis: 17 descriptive studies, 4 interventions studies, 4 reviews and 6 qualitative studies. A total of 11 studies regard the development models of CCC at the end of life, 15 studies were about evaluation of compassionate communities’ programs and 5 studies were about protocols for the development of CCC programs. There is poor evidence of the implementation and evaluation models of CCC at the end of life. There is little and low-/very low-quality evidence about CCC development and assessment models. We found no data published on care intervention in advance disease and end of life. A global model for the development and evaluation of CCC at the end of life seems to be necessary.

BackgroundEnd-of-life needs can be only partly met by formalized health and palliative care resources. This creates the opportunity for the social support network of family and community to play a crucial role in this stage of life. Compassionate communities can be the missing piece to a complete care model at the end of life.ObjectiveThe main objective of this study is to evaluate the REDCUIDA (Redes de Cuidados or Network of Care) intervention for the development and management of networks of care around people with advanced disease or at the end of life.MethodsThe study is a 2-year nonrandomized controlled trial using 2 parallel groups. For the intervention group, we will combine palliative care treatment with a community promoter intervention, compared with a control group without intervention. Participants will be patients under a community palliative care team’s supervision with and without intervention. The community promotor will deliver the intervention in 7 sessions at 2 levels: the patient and family level will identify unmet needs, and the community level will activate resources to develop social networks to satisfy patient and family needs. A sample size of 320 patients per group per 100,000 inhabitants will offer adequate information and will give the study 80% power to detect a 20% increase in unmet needs, decrease families’ burden, improve families’ satisfaction, and decrease the use of health system resources, the primary end point. Results will be based on patients’ baseline and final analysis (after 7 weeks of the intervention). We will carry out descriptive analyses of variables related to patients’ needs and of people involved in the social network. We will analyze pre- and postintervention data for each group, including measures of central tendency, confidence intervals for the 95% average, contingency tables, and a linear regression. For continuous variables, we will use Student t test to compare independent samples with normal distribution and Mann-Whitney U test for nonnormal distributions. For discrete variables, we will use Mann-Whitney U test. For dichotomous variables we will use Pearson chi-square test. All tests will be carried out with a significance level alpha=.05.ResultsEthical approval for this study was given by the Clinical Research Committee of Andalusian Health Service, Spain (CI 1020-N-17), in June 2018. The community promoter has been identified, received an expert community-based palliative care course, and will start making contacts in the community and the palliative care teams involved in the research project.ConclusionsThe results of this study will provide evidence of the benefit of the REDCUIDA protocol on the development and assessment of networks of compassionate communities at the end of life. It will provide information about clinical and emotional improvements, satisfaction, proxy burden, and health care resource consumption regarding patients in palliative care.Registered Report IdentifierRR1-10.2196/10515

Greater interventions at the end of life at the community level are necessary, strengthening the care capacity of primary health care, both from training and support from expert teams in order to change the current care profile to a more outpatient care that allows a lower consumption of resources and greater care at home.