Introduction

This book was inspired by the apparent need to restore humanity to healthcare, particularly within a period of austerity, affecting many countries. Furthermore it was intended to look at the broader picture at various levels of the healthcare system, as compassion across the health care teams themselves, and from an organizational level are essential factors. In 2011, the editors of this book organized a Symposium at Greenwich University on the topic of compassion in health care (Shea et al. 2011). The intention was to bring together key people from various backgrounds with an interest in moving forward with the science and art of compassion. The realization, following the symposium, was that people are united in moving forward on this topic, thus this experience has led us to conduct further work in bringing key people together with the common aim of enhancing compassion in health care

Compassion is a growing eld requiring a multidisciplinary approach, thus we are privileged to have contributions from a range of different elds, covering medicine, nursing, psychotherapy, psychology, sociology, and organizational factors, to reect the multidisciplinary nature of the book. Furthermore, a key feature of this book is the inclusion of service-user, carer, patient representatives and health care professionals’ experience. These are interwoven throughout, drawing attention to positive as well as negative experiences with the aim of providing a valuable ‘real-life’ learning tool for our target readership.