Stress impacts everyone in healthcare, eroding compassion, straining relationships, and contributing to burnout and error. Yet research shows that simply seeing acts of kindness can reduce stress, promote calm, and foster a sense of shared humanity.

The Schwartz Center for Compassionate Healthcare hosted its annual Attorney Breakfast featuring Dr. Troyen Brennan, a nationally recognized health law, public policy, and healthcare delivery expert. Dr. Brennan is the author of the recently published “Wonderful and Broken: The Complex Reality of Primary Care in the United States.”

The event featured a comprehensive discussion of primary care in the United States, its critical role in healthcare delivery, and the relationship between effective primary care and compassionate medicine. Dr. Brennan drew insights from his extensive fieldwork throughout the country.

Advances in brain imaging and the neurosciences allow previously unimaginable insights into the workings of the human mind, but not necessarily how to translate that knowledge into a benefit or patients or providers. This is the root of the T. Denny Sanford Institute for Empathy and Compassion’s research. This webinar featured several Sanford Institute leaders discussing how they leverage the neurobiology of empathy and compassion to create initiatives that are game-changing for medical education and patient care.

 Dr. Tom Lee, chief medical offer at Press Ganey and author of “Social Capital in Healthcare,” described how social capital, defined as networks of relationships characterized by trust, shared values, and mutual support, is the foundation of compassionate healthcare delivery.

Since 2016, Donor Network West (DNW), a California-based organ procurement organization, has implemented the Schwartz Rounds program as a cornerstone of their organizational culture. Led by facilitator Gwenn Silva, the program has become an essential support system for staff who ace the unique challenges of working with death and trauma daily.

The Schwartz Center recently hosted a roundtable discussion on the successful implementation of the Schwartz Rounds program at Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts (BCBSMA), demonstrating how this innovative adaptation can transform organizational culture, enhance employee well-being, and ultimately improve outcomes for both their staff and patient members.

The Schwartz Center for Compassionate Healthcare hosted a roundtable discussion focusing on the critical role of compassion in front-line healthcare delivery. Three distinct healthcare organizations — a safety net hospital system, a cancer center, and an end-of- life care facility — are each addressing the challenge of maintaining compassionate care despite increasing external pressures.

Patient safety events impact not just patients, but also the healthcare team members who care for them. Clinicians can experience emotional distress, guilt, and loss of confidence – which can be compounded by legal consequences and professional repercussions. The emotional aftermath of these events may contribute to a culture of fear in healthcare settings, making it harder to learn from mistakes and improve patient care. This webinar, featuring Maria Gonsalves Schimpf, MA, MT-BC, well-being leader at Boulder Community Health, and Dr. Read Pierce, chief quality, safety, and transformation offer at Denver Health, explored how grounding patient safety improvement efforts in compassion science benefits both patients and providers. Panelists highlighted the connection between burnout, compassion, and patient safety, providing practical strategies for implementing trauma-informed practices in healthcare settings.

Compassion means not only understanding and feeling another’s suffering, but also taking action to help them. While empathy means feeling or cognitively understanding another’s emotions and perspectives, compassion goes further by motivating behaviors to reduce their distress.

More than 100 peer-reviewed and descriptive studies have documented the benefits of the Schwartz Rounds program for over 25 years.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is here and evolving quickly. This presentation will discuss the opportunities, promises and challenges of AI hosted by Schwartz Center Chief Medical Officer Beth Lown, MD, moderated by Karl Swanson, MD, co-founder and head of data science at Quench, and panelists Michael Lesh, MD, CEO and founder of Quench, Ashwin Nayak, MD, MS, clinical assistant professor of medicine at Stanford University, and Vivek Rudrapatna, MD, PhD, gastroenterologist and assistant professor at University of California, San Francisco. Our panelists described how AI is being used in healthcare now, and what we can expect in the near future and long-term. We discussed how this may affect compassionate patient care and healthcare workforce well-being, and what we can do collectively to shape this future. The discussion followed with Q&A.

In line with our efforts to build more compassionate cultures within healthcare, our Chief Medical Officer Dr. Beth Lown, will be joining Dr. Stephen Beeson, CEO and Founder of Practicing Excellence, for a live discussion this 25th of June at 12 PM PT/3 PM ET. In this live discussion, they will shine a light on building compassionate cultures in healthcare and the benefits of the human development journey to enhance everyone’s ability to connect with patients, collaborate with peers, and lead in ways that inspire meaningful change. Visit the episode page to find out more.

We published a paper in “Healthcare Management Forum” describing early results of the Schwartz Center’s Healing Healthcare Initiative (HHI) pilot program. As we know, the COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated burnout, highlighted health inequities, and increased staffing shortages. In particular, it intensified psychological stress injuries and mental health issues among healthcare workers and leaders.

For decades, interventions for clinician distress have been less effective than hoped. By expanding our understanding of the clinicians’ experience to include moral injury, we can create organizations with thriving practitioners who can offer better care for their patients. Join us for this special webinar, hosted by Schwartz Center Chief Medical Officer Dr. Beth Lown, as we learn from Dr. Wendy Dean, CEO and co-founder of The Moral Injury of Healthcare. Dr. Dean is the author of “If I Betray These Words: Moral Injury In Medicine” and “Why It’s So Hard For Clinicians to Put Patients First,” and cohost of the “Moral Matters” and “43cc” podcasts. 

In this webinar, Dr. Ken Epstein explains the characteristics of organizations that induce and perpetuate trauma through inequitable practices and policies, hierarchical decision-making, and reactivity rather than intentional reflection. Becoming a Trauma-Informed System (TIS) and ultimately a healing organization requires systemic change that promotes connection, coherent meaning making, and inclusive collaboration to address and prevent the ways organizations can induce stress and harm on its employees and the community.

The COVID-19 pandemic has thrown into sharp relief long-standing inequities in the American healthcare system. Black and brown communities have experienced a disproportionate number of coronavirus cases and deaths. For example, at the height of the pandemic in New York City, age-adjusted mortality rates for Blacks and Latinos were double those of whites and Asians. The pandemic’s economic devastation has been unevenly experienced as well. In a national survey conducted in July and August of 2020, 72% of Latino, 60% of Black, and 55% of Native American people reported they were experiencing serious financial problems. In contrast, 37% of Asian and 36% of white people said the same.

Despite our scientific understanding of addiction as a chronic disease whose sufferers are prone to relapses, many health professionals and the public still believe that addiction is a choice or a moral failing. Furthermore, common everyday language and slang stigmatizes individuals with SUD and creates cognitive bias towards punitive judgment rather than compassion.

At the Schwartz Center for Compassionate Healthcare’s recent New York Thought Leadership Breakfast, in partnership with NewYorkBIO and held at the New York Genome Center, a panel of experts representing diverse perspectives came together to discuss the impact of healthcare cost containment on the patient-caregiver relationship, with a specific focus on so-called “step therapies” to contain prescription drug costs

Compassion is not a panacea for what ails the U.S. healthcare system, but it can be the foundation for improving patients’ care experiences, patient and caregiver satisfaction, and a hospital’s bottom line.

At a recent panel discussion in Boston, four thought leaders who work at the intersection of medicine and technology discussed how new healthcare technologies are affecting the patient-caregiver relationship.

Compassion is essential for effective collaboration among healthcare professionals, staff, patients and families. But despite evidence supporting the importance of compassionate healthcare, the concepts and skills related to empathy and compassion, and that are needed to provide person-/family-centered and relationship-based care, are not routinely taught, modeled and assessed across the continuum of learning and practice.

In our increasingly complex healthcare environments, collaboration is essential if we are to progress toward the “Triple Aim” of creating positive patient and family experiences and better health at lower cost.

Between October 2013 and April 2014, the Schwartz Center for Compassionate Healthcare and the Conference of Boston Teaching Hospitals (COBTH) held eight special Schwartz Center Rounds^® sessions for hospital staff , first responders and medical volunteers who treated those injured in the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings.

Despite the current focus on patient centeredness, healthcare professionals face numerous challenges that impede their ability to provide compassionate care that ameliorates concerns, distress, or suffering.