Compassion: a critical review of peer‐reviewed nursing literature
Bibliographic record
Abstract
AIMS AND OBJECTIVES: To provide a critical review of nursing literature about compassion, identifying major themes, questions arising and directions for future investigation of the topic. BACKGROUND: Compassion has emerged as a topic of broad social concern in recent years and is particularly pertinent to nurses. DESIGN: Critical review was selected as the most appropriate way of analysing literature from both qualitative research studies and conceptual articles. METHODS: An electronic database search was conducted, discovering articles published between 1952 and 2013. The search was then limited to publications since 2000 to capture recent development of the concept. The search was limited to peer-reviewed literature, excluding a large body of editorial material, resulting in 20 relevant articles. Two books were also added that contributed important perspective to the analysis. Critical analysis of the resulting material was undertaken to identify themes, tensions and implications in the literature. RESULTS: Major themes were compassion as practice and compassion as a moral virtue, holding implications for how nurses can demonstrate compassion in relation to contemporary healthcare values. A third major theme was the influence of institutional environments in facilitating or limiting the expression of compassion. CONCLUSIONS: Compassion is a human experience of deep significance to nursing and needs understanding in the context of healthcare environments dominated by discourses of efficiency and rationalisation. There is an emergent literature about how compassion may be understood, taught and sustained among nurses but it is a topic that requires continued attention. RELEVANCE TO CLINICAL PRACTICE: More precise understanding of compassion will support nurses in advocating for compassionate care, participating in interdisciplinary dialogue, and contributing to the design of healthcare environments that are conducive to compassionate care.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.132 | 0.328 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.045 | 0.020 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.006 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.007 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".