The findings of the report, which surveyed around 4,500 patients, are a break from what are traditionally believed to be the main predictors of quality
The level of compassion a patient receives best determines their perception of the quality of care, a group of researchers led by a professor at the University of Calgary have found.
The findings of their report, which surveyed 4,501 patients of emergency departments in several hospitals across Alberta, are a break from what are traditionally believed to be the main predictors of quality — the length of wait times, how clinical information is collected or dispensed, or the ease of the discharge process — though they’re all important, said Shane Sinclair, a nursing professor at the university.
Sinclair said the impetus for the research came from his interactions with patients as a spiritual care practitioner across several hospitals many years ago.
“I would hear time and time again about elements of compassion when they talked about having the best nurse or having an amazing physician,” he said. “I would sort of ask them, ‘What makes that physician, that nurse, that social worker, so amazing? And inevitably, it boiled down to things like, ‘They’re just a really warm human being.’”
Years later, he endeavoured to find out empirically how important such qualities were.
As a result, Sinclair tried to be precise in his definition of compassion. In the report, the term is defined as “a virtuous response that seeks to address the suffering and needs of a person through relational understanding and action.”
To Sinclair, it means empathy — the ability to understand the interior experience of someone else — powered by a desire to help alleviate their struggle.
Series of questions utilized to measure compassion
But how does one measure a quality as nebulous as compassion in a professional setting?
Sinclair said he and another group of researchers at the University of Manitoba and Acadia University in Nova Scotia took four years to come up with a model. They whittled down an initial set of 150 questions to 15, which included questions about the level of sensitivity, comfort and warmth during an interaction.
Sinclair and his collaborators, working in partnership with the Health Quality Council of Alberta (HQCA) and Innovate Calgary, put their questions to the test in their latest study. Every two weeks for five months in 2022, survey vendors dialled 160 patients, half of whom were discharged, while the rest were admitted to the hospital after their visit.
Researchers discovered, as mentioned in their report, that “compassion . . . was by far, the variable with the strongest prediction of overall quality care ratings, with a moderate-to-large effect size.”
Different groups see different levels of compassion
The study also found differences in the level of compassion shown to different groups of patients. Women reported lower levels of compassion than men, while Indigenous people were treated more poorly than white patients. The differences in both situations, the report stated, were “statistically significant.”
“Compassion is as important as all of the things that we do for patients; the way that we are with patients and families, is also key as well,” Sinclair said.
‘Biggest challenge to improving compassion’ at the organizational level
But compassion isn’t formulaic, which makes it challenging to institutionalize the quality among health-care workers. Sinclair said it could simply mean allowing providers to build on their current level of compassion.
“It is something that most health-care providers innately desire to do in their work,” Sinclair said. “And so, it would be erroneous to sort of say, now we’re going to teach you something you don’t know.”
If compassion is an important metric for the quality of one’s care, then it must become the organization’s priority, and so do other elements that contribute to it.
“The biggest challenge to improving compassion and health care lies at the system and organizational level,” Sinclair said, adding he is planning to address this issue in his next project.