Cultivating Compassion in Health and Social Care : Psychological and Practical Perspectives

Compassion in healthcare is simultaneously a professional practice and a personal response to the suffering of strangers that is shaped by life experience and a shared evolutionary past. This foundational text draws on insights from Gilbert’s body of work on compassion and brings them together with research findings by experts in healthcare to explore the nature and function of compassion in this particular context. The particularities of empathy and compassion and the challenges of both practices are considered. The process of emotional co-regulation that has a practical basis rooted in communication is framed as key to the experience of compassion. Mindfulness is presented as a way of establishing an attuned self-awareness as the foundation for self-care as well as for states of healthy connection with patients and colleagues. The cognitive therapy model is introduced as one way of organising the salient features of compassionate practice. Suggestions are made for cultivating compassion in health and social care at individual, team and organisational level. This book is essential reading for all healthcare workers and students of medicine, nursing, the allied healthcare professions, psychology and healthcare management.