Conectar
To explore healthcare professionals' experiences of providing compassionate care and identify care situations considered challenging, with attention to the factors that contribute to these challenges.
A cross-sectional qualitative study was conducted involving 878 healthcare professionals in New Zealand who completed an anonymous online survey between February and May 2022. Of these, 115 participants provided detailed narrative responses describing patient care situations that challenged the provision of compassionate care. These qualitative responses were analysed using content analysis, guided by the Transactional Model of Physician Compassion and reported following the COREQ qualitative reporting guidelines.
Three major themes emerged: (1) fragmented services, resource constraints, and compartmentalisation of care; (2) clinician compassion needs and motivations; and (3) patient-related challenges impacting compassionate care. Over 90% of narratives described barriers to compassionate care that were linked to interconnected patient, clinician, clinical, and systemic factors—rather than being focused on individual patient influences alone.
Challenges to compassionate care are rarely attributable to individual patient characteristics alone. Instead, they reflect complex interactions among patient, provider, clinical, and systemic factors, underscoring the need for multilevel interventions to foster equitable, compassionate care.
This study highlights that barriers to compassionate care are embedded in complex systemic, clinician, and patient domains. Findings underscore the need for interprofessional collaboration, resilience-building strategies, and integrated approaches to enhance compassionate and equitable healthcare delivery.
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To develop and preliminarily validate a measure of beliefs about compassion in health care and assess whether and which beliefs may predict compassion.
Pre-registered cross-sectional online survey study with a repeated-measures vignette component.
Exploratory and Confirmatory Factor analyses were performed on a split sample of 890 healthcare professionals in Aotearoa New Zealand (NZ). Links with fears of compassion for others, burnout, trait compassion, compassion competency and ability and self-efficacy were used to assess convergent and divergent validity. Linear mixed model regression analyses were used to assess relationships between beliefs and compassion. In writing this report, we adhered to the Strengthening the Reporting of Observational Studies in Epidemiology (STROBE) guidelines.
Four-factor structure featuring three negative (compassion as harmful, not useful, draining) and one positive (compassion is important) type of beliefs was established. Confirmatory factor analysis indicated a good fit and subscales indicated good measures of validity. Internal consistency was achieved for the subset of beliefs (harmful, not useful). Regression analyses indicated negative effects of the belief that compassion is draining on caring, motivation to help and compassion overall; negative effects of the belief that compassion is not useful on the motivation to help and a positive effect of the belief that compassion is important on caring and compassion overall. There was no effect of beliefs that compassion is harmful on compassion measures.
This report extends prior qualitative studies of beliefs about compassion in a large healthcare sample, offering a way to measure these potentially malleable factors that might be targeted in education, interventions and future research.
The study was designed in consultation with healthcare and compassion research professionals, including substantial input from Indigenous Māori healthcare professionals.
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