Compassionate Care: getting it right

Seeing people's experiences being used to support learning, education and improvement never, ever fails to delight us.

Laura Underwood from the University of the West of Scotland and the University of Dundee blogs here about the work she and her colleagues have been doing and how stories shared on Patient Opinion have helped.

On 5 November 2016, the Scottish Improvement Science Collaborating Centre, based at the University of Dundee, launched its first MOOC (massive online open course), called Compassionate Care: getting it right.

Intended as a professional development opportunity for healthcare practitioners. the course is free and open to anyone, anywhere, via FutureLearn.

The majority of our learners were healthcare practitioners, but we also had some service users on this run of the course, helping to balance out the discussion. We had over 9,500 learners enrolled on the course from over 100 countries.

The course contains five weeks of work. Across the five weeks, we used a "thank you" letter, made up of quotes sourced from the Patient Opinion website. We were curious to find out how people define compassion and what words they used to talk about it. We wanted to know what actions and practices would be described.

So we used quotes from real patients to examine what different people see as compassionate care.

learners on our course examined various concepts connected to compassionate care

To find the quotes, we searched the Patient Opinion website for quotes that were tagged "compassion" or featured the word "compassion". Each week, learners on our course examined various concepts connected to compassionate care, from person-centred or humanized care, to compassionate communication, leadership and improvement science, in order to learn how to care with more compassion in their own practice, debate key ideas around the delivery of compassionate care, and to advocate for the improvement of care.

We used the Patient Opinion website to create a word cloud containing words commonly used in quotes tagged "compassion".

The learners then contributed their own ideas and words around what compassion means to them. After reading the letter we had compiled from stories on Patient Opinion, learners had lots of positive things to say about the good feedback they had read. For example:

“It is good to find […] that people still take the time to share how much they appreciate it when the organisation caring for them is getting it right.”

The course will run again in 2017. If you’d like to take part, please register your interest here:

https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/compassionate-care

Thanks so much to Gina and the team at Patient Opinion Scotland for allowing us to use your website as such an integral part of our course!

Laura