Kindness Versus Compassion: Prioritizing Kindness for Improved Healthcare Professionals and Patient Outcomes

Abstract

Purpose: This quality improvement (QI) project aimed to provide education for the staff of apediatric inpatient psychiatric unit about kindness and ultimately change staff’s knowledge, perception, and intention to implement kindness techniques. Background: Historically, healthcare has encouraged its ’professionals care compassionately for patients, but by maintaining this position, the healthcare system has created unrealistic expectations of behavior for its ’employees that are unsustainable and contribute to compassion fatigue, staff burnout and shortages, high rates of suicide, depression, and anxiety, job dissatisfaction, workplace incivility, and unhealthy work environments. However, kindness has proven to achieve the same, if not better, healthcare professional and patient outcomes. By educating hospital staff on kindness in healthcare, and how it differs from compassion, there is an opportunity to positively impact the health and wellbeing of healthcare staff, as well as the productivity, culture, and cost of healthcare organizations, and patient outcomes. Methods: This QI project used pre- and post-educational surveys in conjunction with an asynchronous educational presentation to provide education to hospital staff on the difference between kindness and compassion in healthcare. The pre- and post-educational surveys were used to assess changes to staffs ’knowledge, perception, and intention to implement the information before and after viewing the asynchronous educational presentation. Results: There was a mix of Registered Nurse (RN) and Program Specialist (PS) participants in the sample. Eight participants completed only the pre-educational survey and seven completed both the pre- and post-educational surveys. The comparison of the pre- and post-survey data showed an overall improvement in the knowledge, perception, and intention to implement kindness into healthcare practice. Conclusions: An asynchronous educational intervention regarding kindness in healthcare was an effective approach to improving the knowledge, perception, and intention to implement kindness techniques of hospital staff on a pediatric inpatient psychiatry unit. Kindness is largely subjective and further research is necessary to create standardized tools to objectively measure kindness in healthcare.