About Our Project
About Our Project
To support our mission of fostering a culture of compassion in healthcare, we launched the Patient-Clinician Partnership Learning pilot study to explore how compassionate care is experienced, delivered, and taught across patients, families, and healthcare providers. Our aims were threefold:
To reveal the knowledge that underpins compassionate care delivery across disciplines and groups
To describe the features of an ideal compassionate care delivery model
To document our findings through the co-creation and implementation of a knowledge product
Our study brought together seven participants, including concussion patients, their family caregivers, and healthcare providers who work in concussion care. We paid attention to patterns in what people shared about compassionate care—things that came up often, or that stood out as especially important. These patterns became the key themes we used to guide our findings.
Our analysis described many specific actions and behaviors of compassionate care. These components were grouped into 3 key themes that embodied the characteristics of compassionate care:
Co-Creation of patient-centered care: Compassionate care involves both healthcare providers and patients working together
System approach: Compassionate care is a system that adapts to complex needs
Transformative Agency: Compassionate care empowers people
These 3 themes capture the perspectives of our healthcare collaborators, including patients and family caregivers, and healthcare providers. Learn how these themes can be applied in real-world care by exploring our resources page.
This project was conducted with concussion patients and providers, and the strategies identified are grounded in that setting. These ideas may also help in other healthcare settings or for people with different needs and can be adjusted to fit each unique situation.