Take Home Points

  1. Compassion is a distinct emotional response to suffering, characterized by turning towards suffering and taking action to alleviate it.

  2. Compassion is part of pro-social behavior, which is wired into our brains. It is different from empathy or other emotional responses to suffering.

  3. Compassion is innate AND can also be further developed through skills training.

  4. Incorporating compassion into medical care can improve patient outcomes and satisfaction with work.

  5. The practice of compassion is supported by creating conditions that allow us to take the most skillful action in response to suffering.

  6. The conditions that help sustain compassion - Awareness, Embodiment, Humility, Common Humanity, and Action - can be integrated into a common clinical framework used to organize patient encounters. This helps us identify when to use skills and how to apply them in clinical care.

    • Subjective = Awareness, bringing nonjudgmental awareness to interactions

    • Objective = Embodiment, bringing concepts together and demonstrating them within the body

    • Assessment = Humility and Common Humanity, applying fair assessment and recognition for the breadth of the human experience to clinical reasoning

    • Plan = Action, ability to act on our values and demonstrate commitment to alleviate suffering

  7. Compassion is a practice made up of many small moments.

References

  1. Perez-Bret E, Altisent R, Rocafort J. Definition of compassion in healthcare: a systematic literature review. International Journal of Palliative Nursing.  2016; 22(12): 599-606. Available at: https://doi.org/10.12968/ijpn.2016.22.12.599 

  2. Strauss C, Taylor BL, Gu J, et al. What is compassion and how can we measure it? A review of definitions and measures. Clinical Psychology Review 2016; 47 (July):15-27.

  3. Novak L, et al. Neural correlates of compassion - An integrative systematic review. Int J of Psychophysiology. 2022; 172:46-59. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijpsycho.2021.12.004

  4. Seppälä EM, Simon-Thomas E, Brown SL, et al. The Oxford handbook of compassion science. Oxford University Press. Sept 2017. Available Here 

  5. Klimecki OM, Leiberg S, Lamm C, Singer T. Functional neural plasticity and associated changes in positive affect after compassion training. Cerebral Cortex. 2013;23(7):1552-1561.

  6. For more information regarding studies and the benefits of incorporating compassion into healthcare and practice of medicine, see https://www.compassionomics.com/

  7. Reactions to suffering adapted from work in Atlas of the Heart by Brene Brown

  8. The five conditions that sustain compassion come from work out of Applied Compassion Training at CCARE from Stanford University. http://ccare.stanford.edu/education/applied-compassion-training/