Compassion in Healthcare Starts with Listening

By: Neethi Verma

Imagine sitting in an exam room, trying to follow an explanation while worrying about what a diagnosis will mean for your family, your job, or your future. The clinician finishes speaking and asks whether you have questions. You have several, but you are unsure where to begin.

A compassionate response might start with a pause: “What is worrying you most right now?”

That question makes room for something a medical chart may not capture: what this experience means to the person living through it.

Compassion involves recognizing suffering and responding with a desire to help. Empathy can help us understand another person’s experience; compassion brings that understanding into the care we offer. In a study published in Palliative Medicine, researchers interviewed 53 patients with advanced cancer. Participants associated compassion with understanding, action, and acts of kindness. Their accounts offer a useful reminder: the intention to care needs to become something a patient can experience.

Consider a patient who has stopped taking a prescribed medication because it is too expensive. A conversation focused only on whether they followed instructions could miss the reason. Asking what made the treatment difficult creates an opportunity to understand the barrier and explore available support. Compassion takes shape in the question, the willingness to listen, and the effort to respond.

Sometimes that response is practical: arranging an interpreter, explaining instructions in plain language, or helping someone navigate a referral. Sometimes it means staying present during a difficult conversation without rushing to offer reassurance. “Everything will be fine” may be less helpful than an honest explanation of what is known, what remains uncertain, and what happens next.

Compassion also requires humility. A clinician cannot assume that understanding a diagnosis means understanding the patient’s priorities. One person may want detailed information immediately; another may need time before discussing the next decision. Asking about those preferences gives patients a voice in how care unfolds. Concern should leave room for their choices.

Healthcare organizations share responsibility for making these interactions possible. The World Health Organization identifies care that responds to individual needs, preferences, and values as a dimension of quality. Taking that seriously means designing services around patients’ lives and giving healthcare workers the support to respond thoughtfully. Hospitals and clinics should ask patients whether they felt heard, whether explanations made sense, and whether they knew whom to contact afterward—and act on the answers.

AI raises a related question: what would it mean for technology to support compassionate care? If a tool reduces administrative work, the time it frees could create more space for conversation. That possibility deserves careful evaluation. A reassuring message should also be assessed for accuracy, usefulness, and whether a patient can reach a clinician when they need one.

Compassion becomes concrete when someone notices a hesitation and invites another question, explains a difficult choice without taking it away, or follows through on a promise to help.

A patient should be able to leave an appointment understanding the next step and knowing that the concern they struggled to put into words was taken seriously.