Welcome to Competent Compassion.

This website has been set up to promote the concept that in healthcare services, and in particular in substance misuse services,  there are two essential ingredients that are needed that are  simple and achievable and can be summed up in one phrase –

Competent Compassion

My belief is that, especially in healthcare services, the focus has become  “successful completions” (in the case of addictions) or the equivalent measures in other settings.

This is often driven by commissioning targets and means that an organisation that wants to retain and win new contracts has to make these outcomes their primary focus. This can easily become detrimental to the actual interactions between staff and clients or doctors and patients. This is because the “successful outcomes” that the organisation needs may not be appropriate to that person at that time.

And that conflict of interest is not what clients and patients – or indeed staff and doctors – want.

Think of how you would like to be treated by a professional – they need to be competent and they need to have compassion. An absence of either can be either disastrous at worst or ineffective at best. You will not be interested in how the organisational “success” is measured – you want the best for you at that moment.

Therefore I believe that if Competent Compassion becomes the measure by which care is informed and judged – then it could transform the quality of care and shift the emphasis back to something that people who need help actually want and value.

Important information

High levels of Competence and Compassion are the sort of things that the CQC are likely to be looking at when evaluating the quality of services. If it can be demonstrated that these are routinely explored and encouraged by a service, then that could turn a good rating into an outstanding one. Please see the “checkups” page to find out how to access some simple and intuitive tools to help make that happen.