Supporting Compassionate Healthcare Practice: Understanding the Role of Resilience, Positivity and Wellbeing

The pursuit of excellent compassionate care should be at the heart of all practice. However, it can be challenging for practitioners to deliver this day after day in a context of tight budgets and targets, which can erode the passion with which they entered their professions.

Supporting Compassionate Healthcare Practice encourages healthcare professionals to look after themselves in order to maintain and develop their compassionate practice. This book considers how stress management, resilience, wellbeing and positivity can help all health professionals remain close to the values, attitudes and attributes that brought them into the caring professions. It presents and critiques the evidence base for these key concepts, bringing them to life with numerous case studies and examples, and develops a framework - RESPECT - for practice.

This innovative volume is essential reading for all healthcare students, academics and professionals interested in improving both the quality of care and the wellbeing of patients and practitioners alike.

Claire Chambers teaches on the Open University nursing programme. She is a health visitor and nurse and has led public health and community practice programmes at Oxford Brookes University.

Elaine Ryder works for Age UK with older people with mental health needs. She has a nursing and district nursing background and has led community practice programmes at Oxford Brookes University.