While compassion is widely recognised as an essential component of high-quality patient care, the compassion needs of clinicians often go unrecognised and unmet. Clinicians face multifaceted sources of workplace suffering, both sources inherent to working with the sick and avoidable sources due to healthcare systems and leadership challenges. Organisational compassion, defined as the continuous and systematic identification, prevention and alleviation of sources of suffering for healthcare workers, offers a paradigm shift in mitigating and preventing clinician suffering and burnout. Yet little is known about how clinicians experience suffering and compassion from their organisations, teams and leaders.

Our overarching goal is to develop a clinician-reported experience measure of organisational compassion. The purpose of this study was to explore how clinicians experience suffering and compassion in healthcare organisations.

This qualitative study used semistructured interviews of interdisciplinary paediatric hospice and palliative care clinicians from across the USA. A moderator’s guide was developed based on the literature of organisational compassion in management and healthcare and validated through practice interviews with clinicians. 22 participants were recruited via national paediatric hospice and palliative care email list serves. Video interviews were conducted via Zoom. Transcripts were analysed using a hybrid grounded theory-thematic analysis methodology to identify themes and to construct a theoretical framework of compassion experiences.

Five major themes of experiencing compassion emerged: (1) Feeling cared about, characterised by authentic, empathetic responses to clinician distress; (2) Dignity, encompassing being valued, respected and recognised as a whole person and professional; (3) Proximal (team) compassion, including camaraderie, shared workload and mutual support within teams; (4) Structural (organisational) compassion, reflecting policies, practices and benefits that alleviate or exacerbate suffering and (5) Compassionate leadership behaviours, such as presence, empathy and connection to frontline staff needs.

Healthcare work includes sources of both inherent and avoidable suffering for clinicians. In this study, we sought to understand how clinicians experience compassion from their organisations, leaders and team members during times of distress. We found five themes of experiencing compassion in healthcare organisations: feeling cared about; dignity; proximal (team) compassion; structural (organisational) compassion and compassionate leadership behaviours. These qualitative data and results will provide an empiric foundation for the development of a clinician-reported experience measure of compassion for use in healthcare settings. Such a measure will enable future research examining how compassion experiences in healthcare may predict workforce outcomes such as burnout, satisfaction, engagement and thriving. Ultimately, this work may support the design of interventions aimed at strengthening compassionate organisational cultures and improving conditions for the healthcare workforce and both experiences and outcomes of the patients they serve.