During Canadian Patient Safety Week 2024, Healthcare Excellence Canada hosted a webinar with a group of panelists to talk about safer care in the community and focused on the importance of compassionate care. Read on to find out more about this promising practice.
What is compassionate care?
Compassionate care means taking the time to understand people, with no judgment, in order to provide the support they really need—emotional, physical, social, spiritual or practical.
Simply put, think of compassionate care as the ability to show compassion and empathy—feelings that drive a real desire to help and take action to provide safer care and respond to what’s most important to the person.
In the words of Andrea Piché, from Healthcare Excellence Canada, compassionate care is “care that both is safe and feels safe.” For Actionmarguerite’s Micheline St-Hilaire, compassionate care is “the ability to be fully present to find ways to lessen pain in this world. It’s about being compassionate to yourself and to others, and also within your organization.”
Why does compassionate care lead to safer care?
Delivering safer care means taking all kinds of harm into consideration. Providers historically have paid more attention to physical harm (such as falls, bed sores and medication errors), but harm is much more than just physical in nature.1 It also includes psychological, spiritual and financial harm, all of which we must factor into a safer care approach.
Compassionate care is a way to provide safer care, in that it allows for trust to be built between care providers and the person receiving care. By being genuine in both words and actions, showing interest and empathy and taking the time to get to know the person, care providers create an environment where they feel heard and safe. This trust enables a more authentic sharing of needs and concerns, which can then be explored together.
Care providers who know and understand the person better can make better decisions to support them and provide them with safer care.
How to practice compassionate care?
Micheline St-Hilaire says that the most important thing is that, “before you can be kind to others, you first have to be kind to yourself.” Self-compassion allows you to have a healthier relationship with yourself and with others. Before being empathic to others, you have to be kind to yourself, support yourself and listen to your own pain.
A compassionate approach requires taking the time to talk to others to understand their history, needs and fears. It’s about understanding what a good day looks like for them. It’s about figuring out what they can do by themselves and what they need a bit of external help with (doing “with” and “for”2). It’s about building a relationship of trust to break down the barriers to care and services. It’s about showing compassion to allow them to tell you what they need, and listening without judgment, rather than imposing your will on them.
And sometimes, it takes courage. Courage to do what needs to be done, to try something different. To eliminate the barriers and to challenge the status quo, to meet people where they are and to give them what they really need.
What does compassionate care look like?
Compassionate care can take different forms. For example:
- Referring people to the right community, social or health services.
- Helping them find support within their own community (such as aid groups or organizations and help from students or volunteers).
- Helping them access services by supporting them along the process or coordinating things for them (such as finding a snow removal service or signing them up for a food bank).
- Helping them move on or move forward.
Here is an example of what compassionate care could look like:
George is a 76-year-old man who lost his wife to cancer three years ago. He has diabetes and sometimes has trouble walking and preparing his meals. In a recent appointment with Lana, his dietician, he mentioned he’d lost a bit of his appetite. In taking the time to talk to him, Lana understood that his appetite issues were driven by a feeling of loneliness. She used an empathic approach and took the time to ask questions about his friends and family. As the conversation went on, George’s mood began to lift. Before the appointment ended, he said he was going to put together a breakfast with his friends and family in the coming days. Lana asked him if he would share how this went in their next appointment, and wrote down his plans in his chart, as a reminder to check in. She also told him about a group of older people in the neighborhood, who met every two weeks at a coffee shop to catch up and play cards. George asked to know more about the group.
In this example, you can see that kindness can be shown just by creating a space that nurtures genuine conversation. There are many clinical solutions to appetite loss but, sometimes, a kind conversation is truly the best medicine.
Five key ingredients for compassionate care
- Practice self-compassion. Are you as kind to yourself as you are to other people?
- Be flexible. Do you have or can you offer the support needed to do what needs to be done?
- Understand what matters for a person. What does a good day look like for them?
- Get off the beaten path. Who else can help them? Who or what service can you connect them with?
- Be brave. Responding to a person’s needs may require you to rethink and adapt conventional policies and methods. If what they need runs counter to a policy, can the policy be adapted?
References
- Healthcare Excellence Canada, Rethinking Patient Safety, October 2023
- Ageing in Place (Four Modes of Change). Copyright ©2024, Cormac Russell, nurturedevelopment.org
