Background While compassion is widely recognised as an essential component of high-quality patient care, the compassion needs of clinicians often go unrecognised and unmet. Clinicians face multifaceted sources of workplace suffering, both sources inherent to working with the sick and avoidable sources due to healthcare systems and leadership challenges.
Organisational compassion, defined as the continuous and systematic identification, prevention and alleviation of sources of suffering for healthcare workers, offers a paradigm shift in mitigating and preventing clinician suffering and burnout. Yet little is known about how clinicians experience suffering and compassion from their organisations, teams and leaders.
Objective Our overarching goal is to develop a clinician-reported experience measure of organisational compassion. The purpose of this study was to explore how clinicians experience suffering and compassion in healthcare organisations.
Design and participants This qualitative study used semistructured interviews of interdisciplinary paediatric hospice and palliative care clinicians from across the USA. A moderator's guide was developed based on the literature of organisational compassion in management and healthcare and validated through practice interviews with clinicians.
BMJ Open published a clinical update in Research Highlights on 29 May 2026.
The item focuses on Clinician experiences of organisational compassion in healthcare: a qualitative study.
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