compassion is central to the purpose of medicine and the care of patients and their families. compassionate healthcare begins with compassionate people, but cannot be consistently provided without systemic changes that enable clinicians and staff to collaborate and to care. we propose seven essential commitments to foster more compassionate healthcare organizations and systems: a commitment to ...

In1982,WEdwardsDeming suggested that complementary knowledge domains were important in improving quality. Taking that insight into healthcare, Batalden and Stoltz later suggested that traditional improvement was driven by intellectual disciplines that differed substantially from continual improvement (figure 1). This suggestion of different knowledge domains that might potentially complement tr...