Cultivating compassion in undergraduate students: an interprofessional study

Background: Compassionate behaviour is an integral part of delivering good outcomes in healthcare however this behaviour is not always enacted. We developed a compassion toolkit that could be used to initiate discourse around this area of practice.Using the compassion toolkit we explored whether promoting positive acts of compassion to undergraduate students across four health professions (medicine, physiotherapy, occupational therapy and nursing) would impact on their professional and compassionate care practice Summary of Work: Students were asked to record acts of compassion seen within their clinical placements. The students then came together for a research workshop to analyse the themes and write a narrative around the effect of witnessing these acts had on their practice.