In many health and social care professions we are constantly required to demonstrate an evidence base for our practice. As a teacher I insist that no student should write or talk about anything without finding and discussing the evidence base for it. This can make talking about compassionate care very difficult as there is an obvious lack of research in this area of practice. Compassionate care is more obvious in its absence rather than its evidence and is often cited as lacking when things go wrong.  However all evidence is not research, although many people would want you to believe that it is.  In my practice as a teacher I prefer to take a transformational approach which could be considered compassionate, to help people change the way they think about their practice.

Tierney (2018) suggests that the lack of compassion in healthcare research has been due to the notion that people view compassion as an ethical tool to be used when making decisions about and with people but it has not been considered in the wider context of a compassionate workplace, or indeed compassionate care as an intervention.

This is not necessary a bad thing because the absence of research makes us look wider into the evidence based literature than the recent empirical research, that is constantly looking for the next breakthough. Narrowing our knowledge of compassionate care or any other intervention to research, leads us towards a more scientific approach to our care which by default, dehumanises our care in the process. If we treat everyone the same for example, we can never provide compassionate care as it will lack diversity.

Compassionate care does demand however, that we take a humanistic approach to our practice and that we learn how to understand the needs of each individual person that we meet. It also demands that we are able to adapt our knowledge to help them to meet their individual needs.  The evidence for this can be found in social policy and humanistic theory and not always in research.

The image above demonstrates that we need to think beyond the obvious and take a post research or post modernistic approach (See  the work of the philosopher Foucault for a more detailed explaination)  to looking for the evidence for our practice. I agree with Tierney (2018)  however, that our ethical knowledge base for  our practice is a very good place to start.