Maybe insisting on compassion is just too much

摘要

We've heard an awful lot about compassion in healthcare over the past year. There has been much debate, and calls to recruit and reward nurses on the basis of compassion.Can nurses really be expected to treat all patients with compassion? Patients should receive respectful, dignified and high-quality nursing care - is it too much to demand compassion for all? Compassion is an emotional response, and our Discussion on page 18 questions whether it is reasonable to expect nurses to put so much of themselves into each and every patient.