Specialist community public health nursing students’ experiences of receiving compassion from educators in higher education and on placement

Recent cumulative narratives indicate university cultures and learning environments are becoming less compassionate spaces and important relational characteristics eroded. This has important implications for nurse education where compassion is fundamental, deeply significant, and invariably involves the ability to notice distress and alleviate suffering. Whilst the study of compassion and its development are extensive in nurse education, less is known about how nursing students experience compassion from educators in the learning environment of university and on placement. The aim of this study was to explore and reveal Specialist Community Public Health Nursing Students’ experiences of receiving compassion from educators in Higher Education and on placement. Specialist Community Public Health Nursing is a postgraduate specialism of nursing. Informed by Heideggerian philosophy of hermeneutic phenomenology, three face to face interviews carried out termly in a one-year programme in the Southwest of England revealed the detail, complexity, and intricacies of students’ experiences. Findings revealed three overarching dimensions: compassion as observable, compassion as hidden and compassion as opportunities. Within the three dimensions were five themes illustrating experiences of compassion in the lived world as reducing troubling emotions, as creating a safe learning environment, as caring and as a feeling or spirit of compassion. The fifth theme related specifically to university group work and illustrated opportunities for compassion. A three-dimensional model, the Observed, Hidden and Opportunities (OHO) model provides a lens in which educators can consider compassionate pedagogical practices and the student experience. This has implications and relevance for compassion in health and social care education more widely. The study and data collection took place in 2018 before Covid 19. Data analysis and the writing up of the thesis took place during Covid -19