In this paper, I will explore ideas advanced by Bradshaw, Pence and others who have written on compassion in healthcare. I will attempt to see how and whether their assumptions about compassion can be justified, and explore the role compassion should play in a modern healthcare system. I will justify scepticism at the idea of attempting to incentivise compassion through metrics. The Francis Report raises important questions concerning the nature of a healthcare system that harms rather than helps patients. If (...) something is failing in modern healthcare, those in charge should naturally seek to remedy it. I will investigate whether this is due to the disappearance of compassion, and if so, what is it that is emerging to fill its place. I will consider whether we need to rehabilitate or enforce compassion in the system, or to acknowledge that our modern healthcare systems are incompatible with compassion and how we can make the best of what remains. (shrink)

It is argued that a Christian spirituality of healthcare provision is founded on agape. In the medical context, agape is expressed primarily through empathy and compassion. The love that a healthcare professional gives is manifested in two major modalities–namely, receptivity and extension. Empathy is an extension through the imagination into a patient's inner world of experience. It requires being receptive to the pain and distress that the patient displays and speaks about. The theological connection between empathic attunement and the Incarnation (...) is developed. Compassion also involves feeling-with. This receptive stance is linked to rehem- or womb-compassion in the Hebrew Bible. Compassionate receptivity to the suffering of the patient drives a decision to extend oneself in order to alleviate it. (shrink)

Physician empathy is considered essential for good clinical care. Empirical evidence shows that it correlates with better patient satisfaction, compliance, and clinical outcomes. These data have nevertheless been criticized because of a lack of consistency and reliability. In this paper, we claim that these issues partly stem from the widespread idealization of empathy: we mistakenly assume that physician empathy always contributes to good care. This has prevented us from agreeing on a definition of empathy, from understanding the effects of its (...) different components and from exploring its limits. This is problematic because physicians’ ignorance of the risks of empathy and of strategies to manage them can impact their work and wellbeing negatively. To address this problem, we explore the effects of the potential components of empathy and argue that it should be conceived as a purely descriptive and wide term. We end by discussing implications for medical education. (shrink)

In some popular and political discourse, ‘compassion’ is commonly conceived as a simple or ‘given’ aspect of the world. And yet public discussion also focusses on whether ‘compassion' has gone wrong in some way, suggesting that there might be various more or less satisfactory versions of compassion. At the same time, some thinkers doubt whether compassion should any longer be expected of those working in healthcare. This article draws on philosophical and theological resources to argue that the conceptual context which (...) forms compassion is crucial for determining the ethos of healthcare. The discussion explores three themes – politics, suffering and responsibility – which must be addressed in order to understand what is wrong with compassion, to identify lines of future investigation and to develop possible remedies. (shrink)

‘Doing good medical ethics’ involves attending to both the biomedical and existential aspects of illness. For this, we need to bring in a phenomenological perspective to the clinical encounter, adopt a virtue-based ethic and resolve to re-evaluate the goals of medicine, in particular the alleviation of suffering and the role of compassion in everyday ethics.

Philosophical and scientific understandings of compassion converge, both stressing its necessity for the moral life and human flourishing. I conceptualise a dynamic and frangible account of professional virtues, including compassion, and propose that mechanistic organisational systems of care and the biomedical paradigm create a strong risk of dehumanisation and the obliteration of compassion in healthcare. Additionally, the neoliberal market ideology, with its instrumental approach to individuals and commodification of healthcare creates a corrosive influence that alienates clinicians from their patients and (...) severely curtails the scope for compassionate practice. The tension between efficiency and patient orientated care – although they need not be mutually exclusive – has become more acute in the current economic climate, at a time when the boundaries of medicine have broadened and expectations for healthcare have risen. This has created an unsustainable dynamic within which alienated healthcare professionals struggle to fulfil their healing roles and patients experience abandonment and more anxiety. (shrink)

Organ donation has gained much attention as the need for transplant exceeds the supply of organs. Various proposals have been put forward to address the organ shortage challenge, ranging from offering incentives to donors, addressing family refusals to donations and instituting presumed consent laws. Presumed consent as the favoured approach has not been universally effective in increasing actual transplants despite its appeal. Few considerations have been given to the broader ethical climate influencing the organ donation debate. This paper examines the (...) ethical climate surrounding organ donation and identifies the challenges existing within such environments. It explores care ethics and its application to the donation system, demonstrating how it can influence the organ donation phases. The conclusion drawn from the analysis is that a caring ethical climate in the pre, during and post-transplant system respects donor autonomy, addresses family reluctance to agree to donation, facilitates the needs of the donee and creates an environment that promotes non-maleficence for all stakeholders. (shrink)