Grant: Project Grant

Background & Importance: What we know and what is needed Compassionate care is increasingly recognized as an essential ingredient of quality healthcare by patients, family members, healthcare providers, decision makers, and researchers. Despite mounting evidence that it positively impacts patients' healthcare experiences and outcomes, compassion is fading from our hospitals and healthcare training programs. The consequences are significant, as a lack of compassion has repeatedly been identified as a major issue in recent high-profile healthcare inquiries. A major barrier to the development, evaluation and improvement of compassionate care is the lack of a tool to measure patients' experiences of such care in their healthcare interactions This study will produce a valid, clinically relevant, patient-informed measure of compassionate care by building on our team's previous work on compassion in healthcare, which produced the first patient-informed conceptual model describing the various components of compassion Methods: How will we accomplish this? This study will occur in 4 care settings (acute, home, residential & hospice) in Calgary, Winnipeg and Vancouver. Measure development will be accomplished by addressing the following objectives: 1. Ensure our compassion model makes sense to patients 2. Develop questions to include in the measure 3. Verify the questions with patients and experts 4. Test the completed measure in a large group of patients 5. Work with our research, education, policy and practice partners to incorporate the measure into healthcare Impact: How this will make a difference? A tool to measure patients' experiences of compassionate care will provide the means to study, assess, evaluate and improve this vital aspect of quality healthcare. In addition to its immediate impact on patient care, a compassionate care measure will allow healthcare educators and organizations to integrate compassionate care into both healthcare training and policies