Care is not enough…

As pressures on health services across the globe grow ever greater, education of healthcare professionals in both primary and secondary care can be forgiven for prioritising the physical delivery of the care itself. However, it is easy to be so focussed on the provision of the technical aspects of the care that some of the most crucial parts of addressing our patients’ vulnerabilities and needs can often go unvisited.

‘Cum Scientia Caritas’ proudly calls the motto of the UK Royal College of General Practitioners, but questionable translations of this motto often declare ‘care with science’ or some similar phrase, when the core translation should be ‘knowledge applied with charity’. Debating the philosophical meaning of charity in this context is beyond the scope of this paper. However, it is clear that in the modern world charity has wider connotations than those the Latin word ‘caritas’ or its Ancient Greek etymological origins intended, and it is no surprise that the term ‘compassion’ is often substituted, so we arrive at ‘knowledge applied with compassion’.

However, I would propose that the central thread of holistic care running through primary care requires even more of us as health professionals. Truly enacting holistic care requires compassion AND kindness.

So, as educators, how do we inculcate these key elements in our learners? Well, holism itself is clearly a good place to start. How someone feels is so much more than an aggregate of their symptoms and properly attending to their care must include more than simply addressing those symptoms or the underlying pathology. Ancient Greek, this time embodied by Aesop, again lights the way …

No act of kindness, however small, is ever wasted.

Kindness is free, and compassion and caring cannot truly exist without it.

The systems we work in need, in many cases, to shift their stance from measuring the amount of care provided to allowing and encouraging the time and space for care to be provided with compassion and kindness, so that care provision more often becomes caring. Many patients can be cured and even more can be treated, but all can be cared for with compassion and experience acts of healthcare kindness.

I am confident that most dedicated healthcare educators already see kindness in healthcare as important but the educational and service provision architectures we work in don’t always prioritise or even accommodate the role modelling or formal tuition of the importance of kindness, and as educators we have an ethical and moral duty to address this within the education we contribute to wherever we can. Global society needs it, healthcare systems across the world need it, clinicians of all disciplines need it and most of all our patients need it.

This month’s issue of our journal includes interesting papers about widening participation, appreciative assessment and EPAs and, used wisely, all of these approaches have the ability to promote compassion and kindness in healthcare and healthcare education. I hope you enjoy reading them.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.