Health

Healthcare

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Wherever the art of medicine is loved, there is also a love of humanity. ~Hippocrates

How does a Healthcare Organization become a Partner of the Charter for Compassion?

What groups or organizations are already Partners in the Healthcare sector?

What role does Healthcare play in supporting the global movement for compassion?

How does a Healthcare Organization become a Partner of the Charter for Compassion?

Affirm the Charter and become a Partner. We invite you to join a worldwide alliance of healthcare partners working together to instill compassion in all healthcare relationships and systems. Through self-directed learning, workshops, consulting, conferences, and online resources, we aim to catalyze a seismic shift toward relationship-centered healthcare. Partners receive newsletters, and dedicated space on our website.

Compassion in Healthcare

A compassionate healthcare system provides holistic care that recognizes the immense importance of healing relationships, and pays attention not only to physical disease and bio-medicine but also to emotional, psychological, social and spiritual wellbeing of patients and their families. Attending to compassion and relationships in healthcare significantly improves quality, outcomes, satisfaction, and experience of care.

Our goal is to create a significant and measurable shift in the understanding of professionals, patients, insurers, and institutions and healthcare systems for how compassion is the linchpin of successful, holistic, and cost-effective healthcare from individual examining rooms to entire systems.

The Future of Healthcare

In December of 2012, a U.N. resolution was passed encouraging governments to move toward providing universal access to affordable and quality healthcare. As countries move toward that goal, common challenges emerge—access issues worldwide, the cost and competencies of care, new diseases and epidemics, a shortage of practitioners in both populated and remote areas of the world, population growth and aging rates, equipment shortages and expense, the impact of climate change on health in every region, a lack of adequate clean water, healthy diet, and sufficient resources to support health instead of illness; the need for education in care and prevention; the rising cost and debt of training; practitioner burnout; and an increasing focus on science and technology, and diminished attention to relationships and compassion, as we care for our patients and their healthcare needs from birth to end of life.

How will these challenges be met in the twenty-first century and beyond? What has become obvious is that the job is overwhelming if we attempt to do it separately, and remotely from one another. But in acting together from a place of understanding, contribution and compassion, for all souls of the world, we are on the threshold of a change holding potential to accomplish grand things in healthcare and its delivery.

The Charge and Commission

The Charter for Compassion charges the people and practices that constitute care for health, inviting them to come together in the mission of establishing a more complete kind of healthcare that addresses the needs of the human population in all parts of our world. We begin with a space to share knowledge and with a committed pledge and thrust toward compassion for the human population of the whole planet.

Healthcare Practice

The journey from illness to wellness is not just the responsibility of the physician. It takes a team. Everyone in the orbit of the sick individual is responsible for a portion-- including and foremost—the patient. Wellness moves beyond the application of technology and treatments. It involves the entire being from its physicality to the psycho-social and spiritual invisible engines that drive the mind and spirit of a human being toward wholeness.

Charter of Compassion for Care

In 2010, a group of medical students from various Dutch universities came together. They discovered that they all felt that the medical training they were receiving was technical, lacking attention to personal leadership, retention of passion / enthusiasm, self-compassion and compassion with patients. They decided to organize a conference on these themes. They asked people from all sorts of groups - doctors, nurses, patients, members of the Executive Board, IGZ, scientists etc. - to think along with them about a Charter of Compassion for Care. This meeting took place in February 2011 and 100 people delivered the main themes and words for the charter.