What? Canada has a health human resource crisis. The COVID-19 pandemic has led to a high degree of post-traumatic stress among front-line healthcare providers, which may be reason for the 96.5% increase in healthcare vacancies in comparison to before the pandemic. Indeed, systematic review results indicate that working in front line settings during coronavirus outbreaks (SARS 2003, MERS 2012, and COVID-19) is a risk factor for post traumatic stress. Interventions to support the Canadian workforce are urgently needed.
Why? Organizational compassion -the process in which organizational members collectively notice, feel, and respond to pain within their organization (Guo & Zhu, 2021)- has been shown to facilitate post-traumatic healing, reduce burn-out, and increase employee subjective wellbeing and sense of commitment and motivation towards work. Despite the many identified benefits of organizational compassion, our previous research on this topic suggests that healthcare organizations do not often optimally promote organizational compassion. The overall purpose of this project was to formulate a research plan to develop, implement and evaluate a framework to promote organizational compassion in front-line in-patient healthcare settings.
How? In this 1-year project, we used two different approaches to determine how organizational compassion can be used as a strategy to mitigate healthcare provider post traumatic stress. We initially conducted a scoping review to summarize and distill essential organizational-level components that promote organizational compassion. We then organized a one day, in-person consultation with stakeholders across South-Eastern Ontario to collectively re-imagine organizational compassion within healthcare workplaces and develop a plan to move findings into practice.
Results: See attached documents for a full report and summary.
Impact of findings: The identified components and strategies to promote organizational compassion within healthcare organizations will be disseminated to multiple stakeholder groups (e.g., professional organizations, patient advocacy groups, policy makers, and research community) and can have great implications for the development of specific interventions to alleviate and protect healthcare professionals from the psychological impact of pandemic-related traumatic events.