Compassion and courage: the leadership challenge!

Hi Nicole good to read your thoughts on compassion. This is something that is of great interest to me particularly as in my experience throughout my career I have witnessed some of the most tremendous acts of compassion, many of which took a great deal if courage. However it was as a young child, growing up in Northern Ireland, that I first came to understand the true meaning of compassion and the tremendous amount of courage it takes to be truly compassionate. My mother who has no medical or nursing background left our house on a number of occasions in very frightening circumstances to ‘be with’ men as they breathed their last, having been shot. Many tines she attempted life saving first aid but on a number of occasions she merely held the hand of a dying person and whispered words of kindness, sometimes she prayed ( probably always) but always she touched and got down on the ground to ‘be with’ the person while ambulances were summonsed. Often the dying person was not entirely innocent and many times he had been the perpetrator of evil, hurt and grief. To her that did not matter – what she saw was someone in pain, alone and dying. On several occasions she put her own life at risk to be seen helping ‘someone from the other side’ . I have not observed, witnessed or been aware of such simple acts of compassion that required tremendous courage and lack of thought for self. And while I have seen an abundance of courage in nursing towards patients what in my experience has been sadly lacking is courage and compassion from several of our professional leaders – lack of courage to demonstrate compassion towards staff working in appalling circumstances where dangerously low staffing levels put both our patients, our staff providing care and at times our senior staff at risk – risk of harm, risk of making mistakes, risk of losing professional registration, risk of losing jobs, risk of losing self belief, respect and fulfillment – how vocal are the nurse leaders in standing up for the rights of the profession to fulfill its full potential to provide superb, safe and compassionate care. I have witnessed very senior nurses lack the courage to demonstrate compassion and have an open and honest conversation with an individual, whose face clearly didn’t fit, but rather sat back and watched the individual crumble through lost confidence, self deprecation and loneliness. So while I started this comment talking about acts of compassion towards others in need of care and the courage my mother showed, my main point is that if we are not compassionate towards each other we will lose some of our best nurses . If our ‘leaders’ who often bask in the lime light of success and soak up the accolades of being hailed great leaders continue to disregard the need for compassion and courage towards their colleagues we will lose some of our best and we have done . Leadership in nursing requires a new focus and definition if we are to truly embrace the courage of compassionate care, to the point that as nurses we define and set the standards of what is acceptable and what is achievable. If my mother, uneducated and inexperienced, could demonstrate the courage and compassion to be non judgmental and ‘ be with’ someone in their greatest need then think what our profession could do for health and care if we all developed the ability to be courageously compassionate about the things that matter to patients and nurses and other care givers/professionals.

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