Compassion as a learning process in Health Professions Education (HPE)

The field of health professions education (HPE) has yet to integrate lived experience understandings of compassion from the varied perspectives of provider and patient with the psychology and neuroscience research-informed notion of compassion as an emotion. This study integrated these understandings into a learning paradigm as a way to inform the teaching of compassion in HPE. This phenomenological dissertation research explored learning compassion using a conceptual framework of emotion regulation and a definition of compassion informed by the fields of HPE, psychology, and neuroscience. Participants from varied disciplines and specialties identified as having had both lived patient and educator experience and as having experienced a perspective change on patient care as a result of their own patient experience. Data were further analyzed using a neuroscientific theory of emotion generation, the Theory of Constructed Emotion (TCE). Five themes emerged in the analysis, (1) Learning What Mattered as a Patient, (2) How Patients Feel is How They Know, (3) Compassion as More Than “Meaning Well,” (4) Providers are Implicitly Taught to Suffer, and (5) Providers Prioritizing “Human Level” Connection. The phenomenon of learning compassion is the process of acquiring new constructions of compassion informed by the patient experience, including expanded conceptualizations of patient distress, pain, vulnerability and suffering, as well as complex variability in what is considered a desired or appropriate response. The process of acquiring new constructions is how compassion’s complexity is learned. These findings indicate the field of HPE can teach this variation and complexity, thereby integrating advances in emotion science with lived experience understandings into health care compassion curricula.