The Importance of Compassionate Care and Tips to Improve Your Compassion

Whether you have an interest in healthcare, are enrolled in a healthcare program, or currently working in this field, compassion is a topic that merits attention. Learn what compassionate care is, why it’s important (hint: it also benefits you), and ways you can show compassion as a healthcare professional.

What Is Compassionate Care?

Perhaps the best way to understand what compassionate care or, more precisely, compassionate healthcare means is to look at each word individually.

• Compassion is defined as the “sympathetic consciousness of others’ distress together with a desire to alleviate it.”¹
• Healthcare refers to “efforts made to maintain, restore, or promote someone’s physical, mental, or emotional well-being especially by trained and licensed professionals.”²

So, compassionate healthcare involves a trained professional’s concern and awareness of someone’s distress, combined with a desire to alleviate it using efforts to maintain, restore, or promote that person’s well-being.

Compassion vs. empathy

Compassion is a term often interchanged with empathy. While the two are related, they are different concepts. Compassion involves being sympathetically aware of another person’s suffering and having a desire to relieve it. Empathy involves recognizing the other person’s emotions and being able to feel their feelings.³

For example, if a patient says they have back pain, compassion allows you to sympathize with their pain and want to relieve it. If you are empathetic, you recognize how their pain makes them feel and can understand why it leads to those feelings or emotions.

Empathy is also important in healthcare. For example, one study found that being empathetic not only enhanced the satisfaction of patients with chronic low back pain but also significantly improved their clinical outcomes — even more so than opioid treatment or surgery.⁴

Why Compassion in Healthcare is Important

Being compassionate as a healthcare professional provides several benefits for patients. According to research:⁵

• Compassionate encounters with healthcare providers are associated with reduced inflammation, changes in pain perception, and the release of oxytocin (a hormone linked to positive feelings).
• Compassion helps build trust, which can improve patients’ adherence to their treatment plan and enhance their self-care.
• Patients perceive compassionate clinicians as being competent, and these clinicians have lower odds of major errors.

Building compassion (including self-compassion) can also provide benefits for healthcare professionals. Compassion fatigue can occur after continual exposure to patient death and suffering. One study found that when health professionals engaged in training designed to cultivate compassion or self-compassion, their compassion fatigue decreased and compassion increased. Researchers concluded that compassion cultivation programs can help improve healthcare professionals’ work conditions and quality of life.⁶

What Does Compassionate Care Look Like?

Here are a few examples of what compassion can look like within a healthcare setting:

• Being an active listener. Do the patients you serve feel heard? As a healthcare provider, being aware of how you listen can go a long way in developing your communication skills. Pay attention, actively show you’re listening (such as by nodding your head), provide feedback, defer judgment, and respond appropriately. All of these can signal that you’re trying to really listen to and understand what the patient is saying.
• Providing emotional support. Being there for a patient emotionally and showing your compassion can foster a positive relationship. This may appear in the form of giving them a safe place to share how they feel. You can also validate their emotions and connect them to resources if they’re struggling to identify or work through difficult feelings.
• Answering patient questions. If you work directly with patients, whether through scheduling their next appointment, billing and coding their insurance claims, or something more hands-on, you are cultivating a customer experience. Being able to answer their questions — if it is within your scope of practice to do so — is part of this experience. Just as valuable is being transparent when you’re unable to answer their questions, followed by directing them to someone who can.

So, what happens when compassion doesn’t come naturally, or you aren’t as compassionate or self-compassionate as you’d like to be? Don’t let this get you down because people have varying levels of compassion, and there are things you can do to increase yours.⁷

How to Be a Compassionate Healthcare Professional

Though it may seem simple enough to relate to others, in a healthcare role, you may encounter patients or customers suffering from a variety of ailments. Over time, this can contribute to feelings of emotional exhaustion. When you see enough human suffering, you may also become desensitized to it to some degree. This can cause you to become selective in who you empathize with — and an obstacle to overcome.

Remember that a key element of compassion is a “sympathetic consciousness of others’ distress.” Pain and suffering can look different from patient to patient and may not always be obvious. To be more conscious of a patient’s distress, make a concerted effort to recognize and acknowledge the distress or suffering they may be experiencing.

The other piece of compassion is “a desire to alleviate.” Wanting to help patients reduce the distress they’re feeling is part of providing compassionate care. While you may not be able to eliminate their suffering completely, showing compassion and empathy lets them know you care.

At UMA, We Understand the Value of Compassionate Care

Ultimate Medical Academy (UMA) understands the need for quality patient and customer care, and the importance of compassion when providing both. For over 30 years, we have offered accredited healthcare education programs to students who go on to pursue positions in a variety of healthcare roles.

Though gaining knowledge as a student is where it starts, incorporating compassion and empathy in what you do as a healthcare professional goes a long way in cultivating a positive experience for patients.

If you’re interested in pursuing a healthcare career path or want to learn more about UMA, check out our videos of healthcare programs we offer, or call us at 855-718-0986. We look forward to being part of your career journey.