Some of you many be old enough to remember Milgram’s Study on obedience and how he told people to give other people electric shocks if they answered a question wrong . Most of the participants followed the order  even though they could hear the pain  from the person next door  (they were actually actors and the shocks were false).  This study reminds us that all people do not have compassion but there were some people in the study who refused to follow the order and we can only assume that this was because they felt compassion towards the other person and did not want to harm them.

In health care there should be many people who can show compassion but this is not always the case and it is very concerning for us all . Richardson, Percy & Hughes (2015) found that there are tools to teach students about how to be more compassionate.  They argue that research has shown that most service users said a compassionate attitude in nurses was valued as the highest attribute. However, we all come from different walks of life and this attitude may not have been cultivated in us by our family and friends.  Being compassionate is how we show or demonstrate that we care about someone enough to want to help them. However when “following orders” we can often forget this and if the person giving the orders is not  very compassionate too, it can be very hard to refuse.

So how do we cultivate compassion in ourselves and others? The above authors argue that by developing relationships with others that are kind, caring and most of all therapeutic  (meaning having a positive effect) we can can demonstrate compassionate practice. In current times with the pandemic and  very high  workloads of many caring professions we can see that staff many not have enough time to care or develop therapeutic relationships, but it is critical to the lives of others  and to providing good quality care that we do.

Developing a compassionate therapeutic relationship is a skill that can be taught often by watching others and role modelling behaviour then checking in with each other how it went.

1. Did they ask questions to find common goals (Universality) ?
2. Did they listen carefully to what the other person was saying  about their needs (Diversity)?
3. Did they offer to help the person meet their needs either through advice or actions (Recovery) ?

There are many people who argue that compassion is innate and cannot be taught but it is becoming more and more evident that it can and should and that it is our moral duty to learn.