By Amy Richards, Ashley L. Graham, Tim Cunningham, David G. Addiss
The fields of global health and health management are facing fundamental challenges, with the collapse of funding, health worker burnout, and a collective exodus from the workforce. In this environment, it is easy to lose touch with the compassionate impulse that drives us to the work – the desire to alleviate suffering. This is a critical moment to revisit our foundational value of compassion and identify ways to expand and catalye compassion in the day-to-day practice of health management and healthcare.
On July 29, 2025, the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Focus Area for Compassion and Ethics (FACE) at the Task Force for Global Health (TFGH) hosted a webinar to celebrate six years of collaboration and partnership. Together, the WHO and FACE have worked to share knowledge, challenge ideas, and spark thinking on the role of compassion in global health, through convenings, a webinar series, analyses, training, and – most recently – publication of the 2025 WHO report on Compassion and Primary Health Care.
Through this collaborative effort, a coalition of innovative health sector leaders, researchers, practitioners, organizations, and exemplars of compassion – in dozens of countries – began to coalesce. As many of these exemplars work in relative isolation, the July webinar offered an opportunity to gather, celebrate successes, share experiences, and envision the potential for compassion to transform and revitalize our health systems in this new era.
Re-imagining compassionate healthcare
During the webinar, Heather Buesseler, Chief Visionary Officer of Humaniterra and Senior Advisor at FACE, led a generative exercise in which participants were invited to begin co-creating the “ideal future” of compassionate health systemsfrom the perspectives of patients, health workers, and managers/administrators.
What follows are key insights gleaned through this exercise. Though intersectional in practice, the key features of this “ideal future” are divided into three sections: Patients, Health Workers, and Managers/Administrators.
Patients
Compassionate healthcare settings are places where patients and their family members are fully seen, heard and respected. Healthcare settings include clinics, hospitals, or even the home if that is where professional care is offered. Patients feel honored as individuals and not “cases,” and that their voices matter in the process of medical decision-making.
Compassion for patients and workers is ideally embedded in all aspects of health system environments, characterised by empathy, humility, and curiosity.
Care given, received, and shared is holistic, equitable, and strengths-focused, meaning that interventions are designed to prioritize a person’s inherent abilities and resources, thus supporting preventive, patient-centered care.
Financial concerns should not limit care, nor deter patients from seeking care.
Health workers
Health workers practise deep listening and respectful communication skills with colleagues and patients.
Trust and safety remain core goals and outcome measures within a workplace. Embedded in these outcome measures is a shared assumption of good intentions among staff and patients.
Professionalism fosters people-centered care within organisational structures. Metrics exist to help health workers monitor efforts to improve people-centered care.
The health workforce prioritises equity in professional practices, hiring, and promotions, and reflects the diversity of the communities served.
Managers/Administrators
Compassion must be centered as an organisational principle
Health systems are patient-centered and the systems themselves build a sense of trust.
The health workforce is empowered, collaborative, and compassionate in their actions and aspirations.
Leaders of compassionate healthcare systems must prioritise community engagement and human-centered design practices when developing interventions to support community health.
Looking Ahead
As demonstrated by this learning exercise, we collectively recognise that to advance compassion in health settings, a systems approach is required. Extraordinary work has been done by a growing number of organisations and national health systems to integrate compassion. An important barrier underscored in this session, however, is that many perceive that the work on compassion remains siloed, and that greater connections and collaborations across systems will further energise and catalyse the incredible work of individuals and organizations.
To this end, we enthusiastically call for future convenings and collaborations that connect and strengthen the myriad “points of light” that we have identified during our six-year partnership with the WHO. These “points of light” include contributions made by organisations that serve as exemplars in the advancement of compassionate action, helping us to ‘meet the moment’. By fostering greater connections among these exemplars of compassion in action, we can ‘meet the moment,’ harness and scale up collective efforts toward compassion, and navigate emerging challenges – together.
