1st Edition
Cultivating Compassion in Health and Social Care Psychological and Practical Perspectives
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 Gilbert’s 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.
This book is essential reading for all healthcare workers and students of medicine, nursing, the allied healthcare professions, psychology and healthcare management.
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
Biography
Linda Fisher is a Chartered Psychologist and has a PhD in Psychology applied to Medicine. She has trained and worked as a nurse, CBT therapist and mindfulness teacher in the NHS in the UK. She lives in British Columbia, Canada.
“This book provides a comprehensive explanation of a concept whose importance to the practice of health and care is now increasingly recognised. Beyond this, it draws together valuable insights and practical guidance on how individuals, teams, and organisations in health and social care, can enhance their ability to provide compassionate care. I will certainly be recommending it to colleagues.”
Dr Anne Cullen, Schwartz Round mentor for the Point of Care Foundation, UK
