Grant: Planning and Dissemination Grant - Institute Community Support

The COVID-19 pandemic has amplified the changing and uncertain work conditions that front-line healthcare providers repeatedly experience. For many providers, these ongoing stresses have evolved into post-traumatic stress (PTS) symptoms, which threatens a mass exodus of providers and adds to the fragility of our overstretched health systems. Compassion demonstrated at an organizational level has the potential to prevent and alleviate PTS symptoms. However, many healthcare organizations need guidance to understand what organizational compassion is, how it can complement healthy workplace programs, and what a toolkit of interventions to promote organizational compassion may look like. The goal of this 1-day think tank event is to formulate a research plan to develop, implement and evaluate a map of activities and resources to promote organizational compassion in front-line healthcare settings. The event will bring clinicians, educators, policy makers, and managers from healthcare organizations together with university academics. Combining their collective knowledge and on-the-ground experience with a review of academic literature about organizational compassion, these stakeholders will expand their understanding about organizational compassion, its role in maintaining and improving front-line providers' mental health, and formulate a plan to develop, implement and evaluate a map of activities and resources to mitigate PTS in their workforce. Following the one-day event, stakeholders will prepare a funding application to CIHR to support the implementation of activities and resources to address PTS, and to evaluate their effect on front-line workers' mental health. It is imperative to identify strategies that facilitate post-traumatic healing in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and recurrent workforce shortages. Organizational compassion has the potential to alleviate PTS symptoms and increase organizational and workforce capacity to cope with traumatic events.