Ensuring that care is provided in a compassionate and respectful way is a fundamental part of building thriving health systems. It also plays a role in better health outcomes by easing anxiety and distress, helping patients better cope with pain and discomfort, and making it more likely that they will adhere to post-treatment advice and medication regiments. What is more, compassion is deeply important to patients and their families – consistently ranking among their list of health care needs.
But respect and compassion – and the skills to communicate them – need to be built and nurtured. This not only requires training for individual health care workers, but also investment in creating enabling organizational cultures that model these qualities as well.
In low-resource settings, research about the issue is lacking. This has marked impact, particularly in countries that recognize its value and want to drive the agenda forward. Ethiopia’s previous health sector plan, for example, positioned compassionate and respectful care among its top four transformational agendas, but a lack of understanding of what works – and what does not – stalled implementation.
In 2021, the Alliance for Health Policy and Systems Research partnered with Ethiopia’s Federal Ministry of Health and the University of Gondar to fill this gap. Using an embedded implementation research approach, which establishes early and sustained collaboration between researchers, implementers, and policy-makers to ensure that studies are relevant and recommendations feasible, the goal of initiative was to inform the country’s new health sector transformation plan by building a strong and varied evidence base.
Building local capacity to conduct implementation research was supported throughout the initiative as well, with a local technical support centre, based at the University of Gondar, set up to ensure the day-to-day management and quality assurance of studies.
A new special issue of the Ethiopian Journal of Health and Biomedical Sciences showcases research findings from seven Alliance-supported studies, with an editorial reflecting on the importance of more systematically promoting compassionate and respectful health in Ethiopia.
Articles cover a wide range of important topics, from the barriers and enablers to providing compassionate and respectful care in pre-service as well as in-service education, to improving monitoring and evaluation practices. Two articles explore the role of community engagement in advocating for quality care, with one looking specifically at whether formal community platforms have a role to play. The role of human resources tools, such as workforce structures and performance appraisal systems are also explored.