Supporting staff to deliver compassionate care using Schwartz Center rounds--a UK pilot

It is essential for staff to feel supported in their jobs if they are to continuously provide high quality compassionate care to patients. One way of supporting staff, of showing them that their health and wellbeing matter, is to offer them opportunities for compassionate dialogue about their experiences of delivering care--its rewards, frustrations and challenges--and their resulting thoughts and feelings. One such forum for these conversations is the multidisciplinary Schwartz Center rounds, now being piloted in two UK trusts with the support of the Boston based Kenneth B Schwartz Center and The King's Fund's Point of Care programme. Here we describe the history of the rounds, explore what makes their format unique and so powerful and report initial observations from the UK pilots.