8-Week Compassion Course for Clinicians and Healthcare Providers
Live on Zoom: September 9 – October 28, 2026
Compassion and Wellbeing in Healthcare is an eight-week course that teaches practical skills to support emotion regulation and is especially well suited for healthcare professionals navigating emotional exhaustion, overwhelm, empathic distress, and loneliness. Taught by practicing clinicians with experience in healthcare and compassion training, this course focuses on individual capacity building while acknowledging systems-level contributors to distress.
🎥 Hear from Dr. Al’ai Alvarez, Stanford emergency physician and CCARE’s Director, about compassion training for clinicians and healthcare providers.
Registration for Fall 2026 is Now Open
DATES
– Wednesdays | September 9 – October 28
– 1:00 – 2:30pm PT / 4:00 – 5:30pm ET
FEES
– General Registration: $750
– Early Registration: $595
– 12 CE credits offered (learn more)
– STAP eligible upon approval
REGISTRATION
– Registration open July 15 – September 2
– Early registration through July 28
– Limited scholarships available – apply here
Early Registration Open
Save over $150 through July 28th
Working in healthcare is
rewarding AND hard
We witness a great deal of suffering. Although we are wired for compassion, daily stressors, and life experiences can erode our capacity to respond to others and to ourselves with kindness. Compassion Education at Stanford CCARE (CESC) recognizes compassion is natural to us and also a trainable clinical skill.
Based on research and insights from psychology and neuroscience, the semi-structured curriculum consists of lectures and group discussion designed to support the inner capacity to care for the self and others, interactive exercises and practical tools to increase mindfulness and meaning in everyday life, and a structured sequence of evidence-based guided meditations aimed at cultivating a warm-hearted and robust responsiveness while protecting against burnout, moral injury and distress.
This course is designed to meet you just where you are at and participants are encouraged to track their wellbeing as part of the process. Related measurable factors targeted in the training are those repeatedly identified in the research:
- Professional meaning
- Interpersonal connection
- Self-compassion
- Emotion regulation
Learning Objectives
By the end of this course, engaged participants will be able to:
- Describe the differences between empathy and compassion, and explain how each influences resilience, wellbeing, and patient care.
- Apply evidence-based compassion and self-compassion practices to navigate difficult interactions, emotional overwhelm, and exposure to suffering.
- Analyze the impact of the inner critic, perfectionism, and self-judgment on professional fulfillment and identify opportunities to cultivate self-compassion and growth mindset.
- Evaluate personal patterns, habits, and relationships that influence connection, loneliness, wellbeing, and occupational fulfillment
- Design a personalized plan that integrates compassion practices and principles to strengthen resilience, meaning, and purpose over time.
Meet the Teachers
Dr. Bornali Basu
Founding Teacher & Co-Director of Compassion in Healthcare
Dr. Bornali Basu is a psychologist and Clinical Instructor at NYU Grossman School of Medicine, specializing in the treatment of depression and anxiety among healthcare professionals and college students. She previously served as Senior Psychologist at Bellevue Hospital, where she founded the integrative Mind-Body Program for people living with chronic medical conditions. A CCARE-certified instructor, she has facilitated compassion-based programs to reduce burnout across multiple healthcare systems in New York and serves on the senior faculty at the Center for Compassionate Leadership.
Dr. Sara Owens Woodard
Founding Teacher & Co-Director of Compassion in Healthcare
Dr. Sara Owens Woodard is a retired psychologist whose career centered on trauma recovery, and the clinical application of attachment theory. She has developed and delivered compassion and loving-kindness training programs for physician and operational leaders in a large healthcare organization and smaller community-based settings, with a focus on emotion regulation, healthy, collaborative relationships and team dynamics, and burnout prevention. Sara brings nearly forty years of formal Buddhist meditation practice to her teaching and is deeply committed to making contemplative tools accessible across diverse professional contexts.
🎥 Hear from Dr. Sara Owens Woodard about her compassion training experience and why she’s teaching this course for clinicians and healthcare providers.