Recognizing the dialectic of compassionate care in the workplace: feedback from nurse educators

Compassionate care and compassion fatigue affects managers, clinicians, and patients and is gaining international recognition. Using the café methodology as a structure and nurse educators as participants, a compassion dialectic between the psychological intent of the nurse to be compassionate and a system designed on maximizing throughput, with the least inputs possible is identified. Our findings indicate that the café in itself is not sufficient to enable experienced educators to take responsibility for compassionate care, but the café methodology opens the space for the important steps of naming the problem, recognizing its dialectical nature, deflecting blame for compassion fatigue away from individuals, and balancing the responsibility for compassion across the spectrum of elements that enable care to take place.