ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on compassion at work in the healthcare sector. We discuss the challenges associated with building a sustainable compassionate workforce in the healthcare industry which is experiencing the impact of transformative change, such as a rapidly ageing population, increasing patient acuity and chronic shortages of staff. This chapter argues for a multilevel perspective of organisations and discusses the factors that can be leveraged to promote more compassion in healthcare. Specifically, we discuss the role of self-compassion, job design, and HR systems in leveraging quality compassion in healthcare and its implications for practice. Our chapter concludes with a discussion of initiatives throughout healthcare facilities in NSW, Australia aimed at illustrating the multilevel compassion framework in practice.
