This is not only impossible to measure it's also counter-productive. In mental health services (and I'm sure in many other specialities) a necessary aspect of the work is challenge. This is not always experienced as compassionate but that doesn't make it wrong. I agree with the notion of keeping people informed but there would presumably be more to assessing 'compassion' than information giving.

Do we want an effective service or do we want a nanny service that in many cases will serve only to maintain the status quo instead of encouraging health or social improvement?

This is just another gimmick by a posturing politician.

Compassion is a vital element of our work but it's not going to be measured easily - too subjective. And who will do the appraisal in such a woolly system of evaluation?

Pah!

I think it's a great idea. Social workers could be given stars to wear if they achieve a certain level of compassion. Plus, it would help if each were issued with a special badge with their name and maybe a message which said "i'm here to help" or something similar. Perhaps also some sort of cap

these are interesting arguments, Stuart. How would it be possible to measure compassion? By how many hours spent listening, cups of tea made? How could service users judge "compassion"? I also think there is an issue around personality types - those who are more "compassionate" could easily be people who are "soft" and find boundaries difficult. Maintaining a necessary level of professional detachment while remaining empathetic is a hard balance to strike though...

I think that's the main problem here - any benchmark for 'compassion' could so easily be evidence of something else. Hours spent talking with someone could equally be evidence of laziness and skiving. Making tea for someone could be evidence of encouraging dependence. Giving people what they want could be evidence of being 'a soft touch' and ultimately untherapeutic. The list goes on.

I do like the baseball cap idea. I know - let's have caps bearing the timeless legend:

"Employee of the month"

on the front.

My partner has had an excellent idea. In fact she's completely changed my mind about this. I will now actively support this plan of assessing our 'compassion' provided that it is accompanied by a similiar performance-related assessment of politicians based upon their 'sincerity'.

What do you all think?

Should we suggest it to 'the people'?

I know - let's have a referendum - they're always taken seriously, aren't they?

The following sets the issue within the context it was extracted from - it's rather too easy to just opick out one sentence.

Treating patients with compassion, reducing the number of falls on wards and good hand-washing are some of the ways the quality of nursing care will be measured, Mr Johnson told a conference.

Mr Johnson set out the plans in a keynote speech to the NHS Confederation in Manchester saying the a new standards will be set to assess not only effectiveness and safety of nursing care, but also how compassionately care has been delivered.

Are there perhaps any lessons also for social care?

Thanks for that Rupert,

That does help a lot. However I still think that it'll be difficult to quantify and the potential for 'false appraisal' is likely to be huge.

Also - the aspects of 'compassion' illustrated such as hand-washing and nutrition etc seem to be to be much more easily monitored via clinical outcomes than by a measurement of something as woolly as 'compassion'.

Cheers,

Stuart

 Can I just remind people not to past whole articles from other websites onto CareSpace - it's a potential breach of copyright. The best thing to do is paste a couple of paragraphs and then provide a link to the rest.

Thanks