Compassionate Care in Healthcare Systems: A Systematic Review

Abstract

Background: In spite of emphasis on patient-centered cares and promotion of their quality, shortcomings have been seen in health systems due to lack of compassion.

Purpose: The aim of the present study was to determine the definition, fields, facilitating and inhibiting factors of compassionate care in healthcare systems and the interventions designed to promote it.

Methods: This study was conducted through narrative synthesis which is supposed to do systematic and synthesized review. Searching was done in English databases including Pub Med, CINAHL, Google Scholar, Web of Science, and Cochrane library, Ovid, Science Direct, WILEY by using keywords of Compassionate Care, Delivery of Health Care, Healthcare Systems, Compassion and Health Care Providers from 1987 to 2017.

Results: Compassionate care has some dimensions including ethical, professional, effective communication, human, spiritual/religious and getting involve with patients. Facilitating and inhibiting factors consisted of the nurse's personal characteristics, patients' behavior and organizational factors included workload, role model, and value of compassionate care in healthcare systems. Educational interventions such as providing feedback and reorienting have been mostly used to improve the compassionate care.

Conclusions: Although compassionate care has been known as the main element of improving services quality in health care system, it has been studied restrictively from the viewpoints of the patients and all personnel in healthcare systems. The improvement of compassionate care through education cannot remove completely the gap between theory and practice, because it seems that clinical environment and organizational values of healthcare system are the largest facilitating and inhibiting factors for filling this gap. Therefore, it is necessary to take measures for promoting organizational culture.

Keywords: Compassion; Compassionate care; Delivery of health care; Health care providers; Healthcare systems; Review.