A report by the NHS Confederation in February 2012 said that compassion and dignity are as vital as academic and professional qualifications in providing care for the elderly. It may seem an obvious point, but in the recent debates about falling care standards it is a very important point to remember. Because both compassion and professional skill are needed – without compassion we have care that may be competent but all to easily treat people as problems and not as human beings. With professional expertise, we may be caring but we may also not meet the more complex needs and address the deeper health and social ills that beset the sick.
It is a reflection of our society’s misplaced values that we have had to state once again a simple truth that should be so obvious – but we are a society that increasingly seems to devalue the elderly and the disabled.
But we are also a society that struggles to understand the notion that care and compassion are neither innate, nor that they are all it takes to be a good nurse. Somehow the misplaced notion exists that academic or professional excellence and compassion are mutually exclusive. Maybe that says something about our professional culture that people so readily see it as uncaring.
Jesus had to regularly challenge his hearers to understand that true compassion was difficult, dangerous and costly. And above all, that it was a choice. In the parable of the Good Samaritan, he showed that to be caring not only one had to take risks to one's personal safety (stopping on the notorious road between Jericho and Jerusalem ran the risk of making one prey to bandits), but also to cross the racial and faith boundaries of the day and care for someone of another ethnic and religious background simply as another human being in need.
In the parable of the Sheep and Goats, he makes an even stronger point that showing care for the needs of others in difficult situations -whether homeless, destitute, sick, or even imprisoned, was an act of service to God himself. Not easy, but costly. The bit of that parable that we so often gloss over is Jesus' condemnation of those who did not show compassion, who did not go the extra mile.
Compassion is a choice then, a habit, a skill even. It is one that we should make integral to our practice as nurses and midwives. It should so underpin what we do, that our desire to care more compassionately effectively is what drives us to seek the training and skills to be more effective. It should be compassion, rather than our own, personal professional advancement that is our motive.
And the ultimate motive for our compassion? That we love others because we are first loved totally and unconditionally by God.
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