Compassion & Healthcare Conference

Conference Overview

The Compassion and Healthcare Conference is an innovative conference presented by the Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education (CCARE) in collaboration with Dignity Health, the 5th largest healthcare provider in the US that is dedicated to compassionate healthcare. This inaugural one-day conference will include talks by academic experts and healthcare industry leaders. The conference aims to address issues in healthcare such as compassion burnout, physician suicide, and more.

What Is Compassion?

Compassion is defined as the emotional response when perceiving suffering and involves an authentic desire to help. Compassion is a virtue that is promoted across cultures and religions. A growing body of evidence suggests that compassion is a natural and automatic response that has ensured our survival and that has benefits for psychological and physical health as well as longevity and flourishing.

Why Compassion And Healthcare?

Given the benefits of compassion and the public’s increasing need for compassion on both the giving and receiving end in healthcare, the Compassion & Healthcare Conference aims to support the development of compassion-based healthcare that helps people learn, practice, improve, and share compassion, empathy, social connectedness, and/or altruism both as patients as well as practitioners.

To this end, the conference will bring together leading scientists and experts in the healthcare field currently engaged in building and implementing tools to foster compassion. In particular, attendees will learn about how compassion can be trained and implemented as an intervention in communities where it is most needed, in this case mainly trauma populations and healthcare systems.

Compassion Week

CCARE is proud to present two back-to-back conferences this November: The Science of Compassion 2014 to be held in San Francisco immediately followed by the Compassion & Healthcare Conference in San Francisco, CA. These conferences are being held as a part of the Compassion week from November 10 – 16, that also includes a “Living Compassionately” retreat, the Tenzin Gyato Institute’s “Empathy and Compassion in Society” conference, and the Charter for Compassion Day.

For more details regarding Compassion Week, please read our blog here.