Compassionate leadership for compassionate health care (chapter from the book Compassion, 2017)

Summary

This chapter addresses the question of what is meant by compassion in organisations and proposes a model of compassionate leadership. In the best-performing healthcare organisations, all leaders make it clear that high-quality, compassionate care is the purpose and priority of the organisation. Working in teams is vital for health care quality but there is also good evidence that supportive teams, with good team leadership, have significantly lower levels of stress than dysfunctional or pseudo teams in healthcare.

The purposeful, visible distribution of leadership responsibility onto the shoulders of every person in the organisation is vital for creating the type of collective leadership that will nurture the right culture for health care. Caring for the health of others requires compassion – attending, understanding, empathising and helping. Research in the NHS has shown that learning and innovation, in the context of psychological safety rather than a blame culture, is vital for nurturing cultures of high-quality, continually improving and compassionate care.