RSF: Compassionate care

The Research Support Funding scheme supported 13 short (six-month) projects that complemented and extended the Centre’s research themes: Transforming Institutions, Transforming Engagement, Transforming Health across the life course and Transforming Relations.

Compassionate care in CAMHS in-patient settings

This project will collaborate with staff and patients in adolescent inpatient wards to ask what they think compassionate care looks like, and what helps it to happen and prevent compassion fatigue or burnout. This will help to develop future research that draws on patients’ and staff definitions of compassionate care and compassion fatigue, as well as patients’ and staff ideas for how we can improve care experiences. It will also offer a space to consider the literature on the systemic, social and political contexts which compassion fatigue and burnout occur in and ways to relate this to an experimental design.

Project Partners

Lucy Maddox

Progress

Ethical approval was granted after a lengthy 7-month process. Access to three adolescent mental health inpatient wards has been approved for staff, although sadly the patient element of the study has not been approved and so the patient voice will not be part of this project. Focus groups with staff are happening now, and analysis of themes will form the basis for a survey of staff to see if themes related to compassionate care are generalisable.