Compassion in Healthcare: Pilgrimage, Practice, and Civic Life

by Joshua Hordern

Overview

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. Applying these therapeutic strategies uncovers how compassionate relationships acquire their content in healthcare practice. The form that compassion takes is shown to depend on how doctrines of time, tragedy, salvation, responsibility, fault, and theodicy make a difference to the quality of people's lives and relationships. Drawing on the author's real-world collaborations, the way in which compassion matters to practice and policy is worked out in the detail of healthcare professionalism, marketization, and technology. Covering everything from conception to old age, and from machine learning to religious diversity, Compassion in Healthcare draws on philosophy, theology, and everyday experience to expand our understanding of what compassion means for healthcare practice.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780198790860
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	12/30/2020
Pages:	344
Product dimensions:	8.60(w) x 5.40(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Joshua Hordern, Associate Professor of Christian Ethics in the Faculty of Theology of Religion, University of Oxford

Joshua Hordern is Associate Professor of Christian Ethics in the Faculty of Theology and Religion at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Harris Manchester College. He leads the Oxford Healthcare Values Partnership which conducts collaborative work in healthcare. He has worked closely for over a decade with healthcare colleagues and patients in hospital settings, primary care, professional organisations, medical education, and precision medicine.

Table of Contents

Introduction1. What's wrong with 'compassion'? 2. Compassion and peregrinatio3. Compassion's nature4. Compassion in civic life5. Compassion and time6. Compassion and responsibility7. Compassion in healthcare policy and practiceEpilogue: Compassion, old age and civic life

Editorial Reviews

...this is a book steeped in theology and practice - and one that seriously recommends itself to both medical and theological, but also civic, thinkers and practitioners.

Josh Hordern stands out among ethicists for the way he brings substantive theological content to bear on practical clinical and policy concerns in health care. In this book he diagnoses the anemic character of what passes for 'compassion' among many contemporary medical practitioners and educators. He rehabilitates the concept to offer a morally and theologically robust vision of practitioner-patient relationships that conduce to genuine healing.

Hordern offers a careful,detailed,conceptually rigorous, and practically engaged theological enquiry into the meaning and content of compassion in health care. He diagnoses serious problems with the understanding and practice of compassion and in response develops a persuasive, theologically grounded social theory of compassion, and works it through in relation to a range of areas of policy and practice. Resourced by the author's previous work on civic and political life, and by his collaborative work with health care professionals and organizations, the book combines a high level of scholarly rigour with a lucid and accessible style that makes it a pleasure to read. The result is an impressive and important theological contribution which deserves a wide audience not only among theologians but also health care professionals and bioethicists.

From the Publisher