In our first post about the Epidemiology of Compassion and Love conference, we covered a broad swath of territory addressed during the meeting. We wanted to share more insights from the groundbreaking symposium.
The Epidemiology of Compassion and Love Conference, a gathering of 70 invited interdisciplinary scholars, scientists, practitioners and leaders, was held January 8-10, 2020 in Atlanta. This conference has been the dream – years in the making – of David Addiss, MD, MPH, director of the Focus Area for Compassion and Ethics (FACE) at the Task Force for Global Health. While the success of the event was the result of the shared wisdom of the participants and the sponsoring partnership of the Fetzer Institute and FACE, it was clearly the vision and devoted hard work of Dr. Addiss that brought this amazing event to life. Dr. Addiss challenged us all to bring our unique perspectives to the topic through the lens of individuals, organizations, and communities.
Several sessions explored the interconnected nature of positive human attributes, which creates both complexity and opportunity for definition and measurement. Even between just two of such attributes, love and compassion, the relationship is complex. Stephen Post, PhD, offered the theory that the foundational emotion is love, and that compassion is one of many manifestations of love. In addition to compassion, in this construct, love can also manifest in helping, forgiveness, gratitude, respect, celebration, listening, loyalty, creativity, and “carefrontation.” His comments were also reflected in the remarks by Matthew Lee of the Human Flourishing Project at Harvard, which also takes a holistic approach to measuring human success. The attributes in the Harvard scale include happiness, life satisfaction, mental and physical health, meaning and purpose, and character and virtue.
This interconnected approach is also reflected in the business research literature around compassionate organizations. It can be difficult to separate compassion from other positive attributes of organizations where multiple positive traits are often grouped. There is a significant amount of study of virtuous organizations, which are defined as scoring well on a combination of traits that include compassion, and also include optimism, sense of purpose, humility and integrity.
Shams Syed, MD, MPH, of the World Health Organization spoke of their global initiatives on health care quality. Low quality care causes over eight million unnecessary deaths per year. Compassion could play an important role in improving healthcare quality and saving millions of lives. The WHO initiative includes seven elements linked to healthcare quality: safety, people-centeredness, effectiveness, efficiency, accessibility, equity, and integration. What is powerful about the application of compassion in healthcare is that compassion has been proven to positively impact each of these elements. The Center for Compassionate Leadership’s framework for developing compassionate organizations has supporting processes around all of those seven elements.
Closer to home, Dominic Vachon, MDiv, PhD, director of the Hillenbrand Center for Compassionate Care in Medicine, shared his deep experience in working with healthcare professionals to improve outcomes through compassionate care. Stephen Trzeciak, MD, MPH, furthered the conversation on compassionate healthcare and measurement by presenting his recently published five item tool for patient assessment of clinician compassion. Christina Puchalski, MD, MS, director of George Washington University’s Institute for Spirituality and Health, described compassionate care as the “clinical dance of science and spirituality.” She spoke of the critical role that contemplative listening plays in giving voice to the patients whose suffering is magnified by a feeling of voicelessness.
Charles Barker, MD, MPH, MTS, Board Chair of the International Charter for Compassion, spoke to the importance of growing compassion on a community level. The Charter for Compassion has over 70 cities and communities globally that have signed their charter. The progress that the Charter for Compassion has made provided significant insight into the potential metrics that could be used in the study of the epidemiology of compassion and love in communities. Atlanta is a compassionate city, and the co-directors of Compassionate Atlanta, Iyabo Onipede and Leanne Rubenstein, were also in attendance and able to share the specific successes of compassion in Atlanta.
Tyralynn Frazier, PhD, MPH, research scientist from the Social, Emotional and Ethical (SEE) Learning Lab at Emory University, which offers a K-12 learning program, presented powerful evidence of the effectiveness of Emory’s CBCT training in the younger generation. Positive outcomes include decreased depression, decreased inflammatory response, and faster recovery from stressful events, as well as stronger emotional intelligence, including enhanced empathic accuracy and self-compassion.
Throughout all of the presentations, it was clear, whether at the level of the individual, the organization or the community, leadership matters. Leaders have the capacity to advance compassion and set the stage for compassionate successes. Laura Berland and Evan Harrel of the Center for Compassionate Leadership spoke of the importance and value of leaders in advancing compassion and laid out the road map for how compassion can be developed within organizations.
The cross-disciplinary group of attendees are committed to continuing the conversation and exploration to accelerate the spread of compassion and love for the greater good. We will continue to track the group’s activity and progress and report back as news emerges.
Image credit: NASA.