Cultivating Compassion in Health and Social Care: Psychological and Practical Perspectives [Paperback]

Chapter 1. Celebrating and renewing the commitment to compassion in health and social care. Chapter 2. Empathy, empathic concern, compassion and kindness. Chapter 3. Compassion: Embodied and evolved. Chapter 4. The function of compassion in healthcare. Chapter 5. Barriers to compassion in healthcare. Chapter 6. Patient and healthcare workers views on compassion. Chapter 7. Active engagement for compassion. Chapter 8. Empathy and compassion: Professional practices. Chapter 9. Communication. Chapter 10. Practical compassion. Chapter 11. Growing compassion in healthcare organisations. Appendix.

This foundational text draws on insights from Gilberts body of work on compassion and brings them together with research findings by experts in healthcare to explore the nature and function of compassion in this particular context.

Compassion in healthcare is simultaneously a professional practice and a personal response to the suffering of strangers that is shaped by life experience and a shared evolutionary past. This foundational text draws on insights from Gilberts body of work on compassion and brings them together with research findings by experts in healthcare to explore the nature and function of compassion in this particular context.

The particularities of empathy and compassion and the challenges of both practices are considered. The process of emotional co-regulation that has a practical basis rooted in communication is framed as key to the experience of compassion. Mindfulness is presented as a way of establishing an attuned self-awareness as the foundation for self-care as well as for states of healthy connection with patients and colleagues. The cognitive therapy model is introduced as one way of organising the salient features of compassionate practice. Suggestions are made for cultivating compassion in health and social care at individual, team and organisational level.