2025/11/01 by Dev Bandhu Poudel, Muhammad Aledeh, Nazia Parveen +5 · 1 voice
Health Professions · Psychology · Social Sciences · #Healthcare professionals’ stress and burnout #Mindfulness and Compassion Interventions #Workplace Spirituality and Leadership
paper · pdf · doi:10.2147/jhl.s555896
openalex publication_date 2025/11/01 · openalex created_date 2025/11/11 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/30
Background: Compassion is a critical component of effective, ethical healthcare, influencing patient care, provider well-being, and organizational culture. Its expression and support vary across cultures, yet little is known about how systemic and cultural factors shape compassionate care. This narrative review examines compassion’s impact on healthcare practices across cultural contexts. Methods: A narrative review of literature published since 2020, searching PubMed, PsycINFO, Scopus and Web of Science was performed. Fifteen studies met our inclusion criteria: peer-reviewed, English-language articles that explicitly examined compassion (or closely related constructs such as self-compassion or compassion fatigue) in healthcare settings and reported empirical, theoretical, or review evidence with attention to cultural or contextual factors. Excluded were articles published before 2020, non-English reports, conference abstracts, and opinion pieces lacking empirical or theoretical contribution. Results: Compassion-focused interventions reduced fatigue and improved self-compassion and satisfaction. Cultural and systemic factors influenced how compassion was understood and applied, from Buddhist-informed to Western models. Institutional culture, leadership, workload, and spiritual care affected practice, while mental health and community care showed benefits but faced systemic barriers. Conclusion: Compassion in healthcare is shaped by individual, cultural, organizational, and systemic factors. Embedding compassion across all these levels is essential for delivering effective, person-centered care. This review contributes by synthesizing recent cross-cultural evidence, highlighting how cultural, structural, and spiritual dimensions influence compassionate care, and identifying gaps in global research. Cross-cultural awareness and structural reform are critical for sustaining compassionate healthcare. Future research should explore underrepresented cultural contexts and evaluate systemic interventions that promote compassion in diverse health systems. Plain Language Summary: Compassion is more than kindness in healthcare—it directly affects how patients heal, how staff cope with stress, and how health systems function. When compassion is supported, patients feel safe and valued, and healthcare providers are better able to manage emotional demands. But when compassion is missing, both care quality and staff well-being suffer. This review shows that compassion is understood and practiced differently across cultures. In some places, it centers on building close personal connections, while in others it reflects values of selfless service, spiritual wisdom, or collective responsibility. These cultural perspectives are important because they shape how patients expect to be cared for and how providers deliver that care. We also found that compassion is not just about individual effort—it depends on the systems around healthcare workers. Supportive leadership, manageable workloads, and training programs make compassion easier to practice, while lack of resources and rigid workplace structures create barriers. By pulling together evidence from recent global research, this review highlights both the promise and the challenges of compassionate care. It underlines the need for hospitals and clinics to embed compassion into policies, staff development, and everyday practice. Strengthening compassion at every level of healthcare can improve recovery, reduce burnout, and make health systems more humane and sustainable. Keywords: compassionate care, cross-cultural, compassion fatigue, narrative review, systemic barriers, self-compassion