DISCURSIVE PAPER The design of compassionate care

Aims and objectives. To investigate the tension between individual and organisa-tional responses to contemporary demands for compassionate interactions in health care. Background. Health care is often said to need more compassion among its practi-tioners. However, this represents a rather simplistic view of the issue, situating the problem with individual practitioners rather than focusing on the overall design of care and healthcare organisations, which have often adopted a produc-tion-line approach. Design. This is a position paper informed by a narrative literature review. Methods. A search of the PubMed, Science Direct and CINAHL databases for the terms compassion, care and design was conducted in the research literature published from 2000 through to mid-2013. Results. There is a relatively large literature on compassion in health care, where authors discuss the value of imbuing a variety of aspects of health services with compassion including nurses, other practitioners and, ultimately, among patients