The Schwartz Center is committed to supporting healthcare professionals with additional resources on caring for their patients, themselves and their teams during challenging times. Please find mental health and wellness resources here.
We know that compassion makes healthcare better – one connection at a time. And we know that compassion has the power to save lives. Compassionate healthcare isn’t just an ideal—it’s essential for patients, families, and their care teams to thrive.
For three decades, the Schwartz Center has been at the forefront of championing meaningful human connections in healthcare. Through our efforts, we have reduced psychological distress in care teams and increased empathetic care for patients – all of which drive improved health outcomes.
Today’s healthcare landscape is marked by unprecedented challenges, including staffing shortages, burnout, financial pressures, and persistent health disparities. Despite these obstacles, we are committed to championing compassion for everyone who seeks and provides healthcare.
Patients and healthcare workers alike believe that compassion is essential to successful medical treatment, how well patients recover from illness, and even whether a patient lives or dies. With the difficulties facing healthcare, compassion matters now more than ever.
We will cultivate compassion in healthcare for patients, families, teams and organizations by:
The Schwartz Rounds program is offered in nearly 800 healthcare organizations throughout the U.S., Canada, the UK, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand. It has proven to be highly effective across many different healthcare settings, but there are still thousands of healthcare organizations that have not yet experienced the difference that our program can make on burnout, employee engagement, patient satisfaction, and an organization’s bottom line.
The program offers a regular open forum where healthcare professionals gather to discuss the psychosocial and emotional joys and challenges of caring for patients and families.
More than 100 research studies on the Schwartz Rounds program have documented a range of benefits, including improved teamwork, increased feelings of compassion and empathy for patients, and improved patient and staff satisfaction.
Research shows that the Schwartz Rounds program is beneficial for patients, individual caregivers, care teams, and healthcare organizations. Studies show:
of respondents said the Schwartz Rounds increased their understanding and practice of empathy with patients
of attendees reported a greater understanding of the psychosocial and emotional aspects of patient care
reduction in psychological distress Read more: theschwartzcenter.org/schwartz-rounds-research
theschwartzcenter.org/schwartz-rounds-research
Our goal is to extend our signature program to support more healthcare organizations and reach more professionals worldwide. We’ll do this by:
We’re expanding our vibrant community of compassion advocates to amplify our mission across healthcare settings worldwide. This network will unite passionate healthcare professionals, organizational leaders, patients and families, our sponsors and donors, and other stakeholders who believe in the transformative power of compassion. This community will serve as both a catalyst for meaningful change and a supportive fellowship for those dedicated to ensuring that compassion remains at the heart of healthcare delivery, ultimately creating more healing environments for patients and healthcare workers alike. We’ll do this by:
Drawing on more than 30 years of expertise in compassionate healthcare, the Schwartz Center has developed an unparalleled understanding of how organizational compassion improves both health outcomes and financial sustainability.
We’ve distilled this knowledge into our innovative Schwartz Compassionate Healthcare Model. Organizations that implement the model’s six domains can create transformative change that enhances the patient and care team relationship while strengthening safety and quality of care, caregiver retention, and organizational health.
Our goal is to share this vision across the country and around the world, and to provide the guidance and support for organizations to make real progress. We’ll do this by:
Our vision builds on our expertise in compassionate care and proven track record of successful partnerships, while boldly addressing today’s challenges. Through the expansion of the Schwartz Rounds program, the growth of our global Schwartz Community of Compassion Champions, and the advancement of our Schwartz Compassionate Healthcare Model, we’re working to transform healthcare culture at every level.
This transformation isn’t just about programs and frameworks—it’s about people and connections. It’s about the clinician who finds renewed purpose through a Schwartz Rounds session, the patient who feels truly seen and heard by their care team, and the healthcare leader who embeds compassion as a cornerstone of their organization.
We invite you to join us in this vital work. Whether you’re a healthcare professional, organizational leader, donor, or advocate, there’s a place for you in our plan to make compassionate healthcare the standard of care. Together, we can create a healthcare system that supports and sustains both the art and science of medicine—one that honors the human connection at the heart of all healing.