Operationalizing Compassionate Connected Care: A path to improved workforce engagement and patient outcomes

Compassion is a shared characteristic among those of us who built their careers in healthcare. You can’t care for other humans without it. But critical as this character trait is—and necessary for positive patient outcomes—compassion can be easily lost in the day-to-day operations of a healthcare facility. The pressures of improving patient outcomes, competing priorities, and meeting regulatory guidelines—just to name a few of the demands on healthcare professionals—often push empathy and compassion to the sidelines.

Compassionate Connected Care® is a framework designed to operationalize caring, compassion, and empathy by defining behaviors, and creating structures and processes to embed those behaviors into practice. And caring, empathetic, and compassionate healthcare begins with caring for the caregiver. Human connection in healthcare is foundational, and when organizations invest in their employees and care providers to enhance skills with respect to empathy, caring, and compassion, they will realized improvements in safety, quality, and experience of care—for everyone.

How fatigue and burnout impact staff retention in healthcare

Healthcare leaders understand that workers are exhausted. Burnout remains near an all-time high. “More than half of health workers report symptoms of burnout, and many are contending with insomnia, depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder, or other mental health challenges,” writes the U.S. Surgeon General, Dr. Vivek Murthy, in the New England Journal of Medicine. While this isn’t a new challenge within the industry—caregiver burnout existed long before the pandemic—it’s been exacerbated and compounded by the COVID-19 crisis.

It all becomes monumentally overwhelming. Administrators and leaders don’t always see a path forward, and adding a new framework may not seem like a reasonable solution to these challenges. However, caring for caregivers is an important first step in beginning to change the environment of care.

Everyone, everywhere, benefits from Compassionate Connected Care

Compassionate Connected Care isn’t a weekend seminar, and it’s not a simple series of modules for staff members to work through on their own. Rather, it’s an in-depth framework focused on everyone in the organization, from C-suite executives and clinical leaders, to front-line physicians and nurses, to environmental services workers, and the receptionists at the front desk. It’s applied at every location of care, including inpatient, outpatient, practice settings, and so on.

Compassion and empathy are sometimes considered “soft skills.” But in healthcare, they’re critical skills. Training designed to bring those skills, which healthcare workers already possess, to the forefront is usually enthusiastically received, because it benefits the entire organization—the patients and their families, providers, and every other healthcare worker.

Flexibility is key to Compassionate Connected Care 

One of the barriers when it comes to programs like Compassionate Connected Care is how to make the training fit within the organizational culture. How can a 15-facility health system with thousands of employees successfully deploy the same curriculum across the entire system? In larger systems, it’s virtually impossible to gather clinicians in person at a single location, and, in smaller systems, understaffing might be so problematic, there’s no time to do any “extra” work, like completing modules.

Compassionate Connected Care is a flexible framework that can be adapted for healthcare organizations of any size. Press Ganey’s team of clinical strategic consulting experts work with a healthcare organization to create an approach that will best meet that organization’s specific culture. Learning modules are based on the themes of the Compassionate Connected Care model and include a variety of interactive exercises to build skills related to empathy, compassion, and caring—for clinical and non-clinical staff.