Beyond Compassion: Replacing a Blame Culture With Proper
Emotional Support and Management
Comment on “Why and How Is Compassion Necessary to Provide Good Quality Healthcare?”
The absence of compassion, argues the author, is not the cause of healthcare failures but rather a symptom of
deeper systemic failures. The clinical encounter arouses strong emotions of anxiety, fear, and anger in patients
which are often projected onto the clinicians. Attempts to protect clinicians through various bureaucratic devices
and depersonalization of the patient, constitute as Menzies noted in her classic work, social defences, aimed at
containing the anxieties of clinicians but ending up in reinforcing these anxieties. Instead of placing additional
burdens on clinicians by bureaucratizing and benchmarking compassion, the author argues that proper emotional
management and support is a precondition for a healthcare system that offers humane and effective treatment to
patients and a humane working environment for those who work in it
