Adventures in Caring Foundation Video Series

We have conducted numerous interviews and questionaires of health care professionals, patients, and family, asking what they need in order to improve health care. The most obvious need is for more compassion. We have identified four elements of behavior that are always present when compassion is felt by the people involved (patient, family, health care professionals). It is our experience that every human is naturally compassionate and that, while we can teach the components of compassionate behavior, there really is no need to teach people to be compassionate.

The objective of our three-part video series is to help remove the barriers to natural compassionate behavior. Those barriers may take a lifetime to remove, but we can at least begin the process now.

In interviews with health care professionals, we discovered six general areas of blockage that this tape series will be able to address:

1. The importance of compassion in healing
2. The importance and skill of understanding the patient's point of view
3. The elements of compassion and how to apply them
4. Permission to practice compassion in every encounter
5. How to deal with specific types of difficult situations
6. How to apply compassion to ourselves and our teammates

Much of formal health care education today de-emphasizes compassion and emotions, or actively teaches that these are unimportant distractions to most treatment plans. Partly as a result of this intentional educational bias, and partly because our culture has become increasingly fragmented, many health care professionals are confused about what compassion is or how it could be applied. The current atmosphere of rushed treatment plans (often associated with HMO business strategies) creates a belief among health care professionals that they are not allowed to be compassionate because it will take extra time. They often are both unsure of the importance and untrained in the skills of empathy…of putting themselves in the patient's or family members' experience. In addition, there are several specific types of circumstances involving emotional reactions of patients and family that many health care professionals find very difficult and feel underprepared when required to respond. Health care professionals often feel dissatisfied with their jobs, under-appreciated by their peers and patients, over-stressed and under-compensated. As with patients' emotions, health care professionals are also under-prepared to deal with these feelings when they arise in themselves and their colleagues and when not addressed, these feelings can lead to abandoning health care altogether. We will be using interviews with top authors in health care to support and explain what the audience views, and perhaps more importantly, to tell stories of personal experiences that illustrate one of the six teaching points noted above.