Compassion in Healthcare gives an account of the nature and content of compassion and its role in healthcare. While compassion appears to be a straightforward aspect of life and practice, Hordern’s analysis shows that it is plagued by both conceptual and practical ills, and stands in need of some quite specific kinds of therapy. Starting from a diagnosis of what precisely is wrong with ‘compassion‘—its debilitating political entanglements, the vagueness of its meaning, and the risk of burnout it threatens—three therapies are prescribed for these ills: an understanding of patients and healthcare workers as those who pass through the life-course, encountering each other as wayfarers and pilgrims; a grasp of the nature of compassion in healthcare; and an embedding of healthcare within the realities of civic life.

Professor Hordern is joined by an expert panel for the discussion. Dr Graham Collins (Consultant in Haematology at the Churchill Hospital in Oxford) Dr Richard Hain (Consultant and Clinical Lead, All-Wales Managed Clinical Network in Paediatric Palliative Medicine, Cardiff and the Vale University Health Board) and Dr Angeliki Kerasidou, Associate Professor in Bioethics, NDPH Senior Fellow, Reuben College Official Fellow, Ethox Centre, Wellcome Centre for Ethics and Humanities, Oxford Population Health, University of Oxford.