Grant: Master's Award: Canada Graduate Scholarships

Compassion is a defining feature of high-quality healthcare. Much of what is known about compassion in healthcare comes from asking patients directly about their care experiences, but it is not always possible to gather information in this way. In long-term care, for example, many residents have cognitive impairments that prevent them from answering questions about the care they receive. In that situation, family members and friends who are closely involved in the care of the patient (care-partners) may be valuable sources of information. Unfortunately, there is currently no scientific way to measure compassionate care from that perspective. My research project aims to solve that problem by developing a science-based tool to measure compassionate care from the point-of-view of care-partners.My research will take the gold standard patient-reported compassion questionnaire, adapt it for use with care-partners, and use three approaches to ensure that it is scientifically-valid. The first approach will verify that all care-partners who read the questionnaire understand it in the same way. The second approach will verify that a care-partner response to the questionnaire matches closely with the response they would give to a different questionnaire about a related topic (convergent validity). The third approach will verify that a care-partner response to the questionnaire remains consistent over time. By providing a scientific tool to measure compassionate care from the perspective of care-partners, my research will help to further our understanding of what compassionate care looks like, what it means to care-partners, and will give us a tool to measure the impact of interventions to enhance compassionate care in long-term care settings.