How Do Health Professionals Maintain Compassion Over Time? Insights From a Study of Compassion in Health.

Although compassion in healthcare differs in important ways from compassion in everyday life, it provides a key, applied microcosm in which the science of compassion can be applied. Compassion is among the most important virtues in medicine, expected from medical professionals and anticipated by patients. Yet, despite evidence of its centrality to effective clinical care, research has focused on compassion fatigue or barriers to compassion and neglected to study the fact that most healthcare professionals maintain compassion for their patients.

The "Ick" Factor: An Unrecognized Affective Predictor of Physical Symptoms During Chemotherapy.

Background: Patients undergoing chemotherapy experience a range of aversive symptoms. These symptoms vary across individuals and at least some of this variation can be predicted by psychological factors, such as distress. However, while psychological distress predicts some of the symptoms, it is limited in important ways.

Self-compassion as a Stress Moderator: A Cross-sectional Study of 1700 Doctors, Nurses, and Medical Students.

Objectives: Work stress is common in healthcare and reliably predicts negative outcomes, including burnout and lower quality of life (QOL). However, few studies have investigated factors that might attenuate the impact of stress on these negative outcomes. We investigated whether the tendency to be kind to the self during times of difficulty-self-compassion-might buffer the effect of work stress on outcomes.

Variation in the barriers to compassion across healthcare training and disciplines: A cross-sectional study of doctors, nurses, and medical students.

Background: Despite the established importance of compassion in health, studies examining the specific barriers to compassionate care in healthcare are few. Recent work suggests that examining differences as a function of professional development and identifying variation in barriers to compassionate care across professions may highlight the origins of barriers and inform the development of compassion-enhancing interventions suited to the unique challenges of different professions and stages of training.

Objectives: To explore whether the barriers to compassion vary (a) between physicians and nurses and (b) across samples of physicians and medical students (i.

Does self-compassion mitigate the relationship between burnout and barriers to compassion? A cross-sectional quantitative study of 799 nurses.

Background: Burnout has numerous negative consequences for nurses, potentially impairing their ability to deliver compassionate patient care. However, the association between burnout and compassion and, more specifically, barriers to compassion in medicine is unclear. This article evaluates the associations between burnout and barriers to compassion and examines whether dispositional self-compassion might mitigate this association.