Compassion: a scoping review of the healthcare literature

BACKGROUND: Recent concerns about suboptimal patient care and a lack of compassion have prompted policymakers to question the preparedness of clinicians for the challenging environment in which they practice. Compassionate care is expected by patients and is a professional obligation of clinicians; however, little is known about the state of research on clinical compassion. The purpose of this scoping review was to map the literature on compassion in clinical healthcare. METHODS: Searches of eight electronic databases and the grey literature were conducted to identify empirical studies published over the last 25 years. Eligible studies explored perceptions or interventions of compassionate care in clinical populations, healthcare professionals, and healthcare students. Following the title and abstract review, two reviewers independently screened full-texts articles, and extracted study data. A narrative approach to synthesizing and mapping the literature was used. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION: Of 36,637 records, 648 studies were retrieved and 44 studies were included in the review. Less than one third of studies included patients. Six themes emerged from studies that explored perceptions of compassionate care: nature of compassion, development of compassion, interpersonal factors related to compassion, action and practical compassion, barriers and enablers of compassion, and outcomes of compassion. Intervention studies included two compassionate care trials with patients and eight educational programs that aimed to improve compassionate care in clinicians and students. CONCLUSIONS: This review identifies the limited empirical understanding of compassion in healthcare, highlighting the lack of patient and family voices in compassion research. A deeper understanding of the key behaviors and attitudes that lead to improved patient-reported outcomes through compassionate care is necessary

A Market-based Approach to Multi-factory Scheduling

In this paper, we report on the design of a novel market-based approach for decentralised scheduling across multiple factories. Specifically, because of the limitations of scheduling in a centralised manner -- which requires a center to have complete and perfect information for optimality and the truthful revelation of potentially commercially private preferences to that center -- we advocate an informationally decentralised approach that is both agile and dynamic. In particular, this work adopts a market-based approach for decentralised scheduling by considering the different stakeholders representing different factories as self-interested, profit-motivated economic agents that trade resources for the scheduling of jobs. The overall schedule of these jobs is then an emergent behaviour of the strategic interaction of these trading agents bidding for resources in a market based on limited information and their own preferences. Using a simple (zero-intelligence) bidding strategy, we empirically demonstrate that our market-based approach achieves a lower bound efficiency of 84%. This represents a trade-off between a reasonable level of efficiency (compared to a centralised approach) and the desirable benefits of a decentralised solution

Aligning business process reengineering in implementing global supply chain systems by the SCOR model

International audienceAs supply chains continue to replace individual companies as the management arena for value-adding from the beginning of the twenty first century, understanding the supply chain management practices in a globalization context becomes increasingly important. The Supply Chain Operations Reference (SCOR) Model, which was developed by the experts and practitioners of the Supply Chain Council, is a major framework for supply chain planning which features supply chain management practices and business process reengineering. Despite being an integrative guide with many merits, it only provides a ‘top-down' approach which requires the comparative analyses of post- and pro- performance indices as a basis of business process modification. This study discusses the limitations of current SCOR analysis and provides a mapping technique— Causes/Effects, the SCOR Standard, and Mutual Solution (CESM)—for gap mapping, problem prioritization, and business process modification in a supply chain setting. As such it is one of the early empirical studies combining BPR and SCM disciplines. The research results can facilitate the implementation processes of multinational supply chain projects by identifying the gaps and linking them to the channel entities

Trust in buyer-supplier relations: The case of the Turkish automotive industry.

While the topic of interorganisational trust is gaining attention in academic literature, research on developing countries remains sparse. With the premise that certain contextual elements may be more relevant for developing countries, we expand on existing models by testing the effect of initial support, use of just-in-time delivery, and informal commitment to predict the trust that Turkish automotive suppliers have towards their buyers. The results support the predictions that soft technologies and informal commitment increase trust. Journal of International Business Studies (2008) 39, 118–131. doi:10.1057/palgrave.jibs.8400309