Table 4 Category 1 - Compassion aptitude: Intrapersonal factors impacting learners at baseline
From: Compassion training in healthcare: what are patients’ perspectives on training healthcare providers?
Theme 1: The innate factor: A baseline for compassion “Some people have it naturally, some people don’t” (Participant 10) “They have to have heart and not lose it. They have to have the heart to ‘be with’, not everybody does” (Participant 25). “It’s hard because some people just aren’t compassionate, they don’t give a crap about anybody. I mean I know there are people out there that are, and there are miserable people out there” (Participant 23). Theme 2: Vocational motivators and life experiences: Inhibitors and facilitators of compassion “The patients need you for more than just what you can do medically for them. I think you need to be there because you love what you do, whatever that is, you just you have to love what you do. You have to love those patients, be compassionate…Don’t come in for the money…It’s something they’re grown up with, they’ve learned over the course of their lifetime and this sort of thing. I think possibly that’s one of the reasons why they’ve gotten into the health care industry.” (Participant 21) “I think in order to be compassionate, there's a certain value in having a background experience in your family life, as you grew up, a variety of experiences that enable you to understand people” (Participant 44). “They should want to be in that place because they want to be in that place, they want to be helping, they want to be working with people in the situation that they’re in, not because they’ve been assigned… I think for some people they just, if they never had any compassion in their lives, they’ll have a hard time” (Participant 10). Theme 3: Embedded resources: Eliciting and enhancing healthcare providers’ capacity for compassion “It’s how you live your life…you’re born with a bit of it but it doesn’t come, you have to work at it as well” (Participant 38). “You can plant the seeds and through experience, it can grow” (Participant 8). “I think we're gifted with different amounts of intuitiveness, and we are gifted in a sense of some people find it more easier more than others do… I think we have to teach them there are techniques.” (Participant 47). “It’s there, the compassion is there already, it just needs to bloom” (Participant 49). |