Qualitative HPE Study Identifies Compassion as a Learning Process

A phenomenological dissertation in health professions education identified compassion as a learning process in which people acquire new understandings of patient distress, pain, vulnerability, suffering and the responses patients may consider desirable or appropriate. The study examined how lived experience and emotion science can inform the teaching of compassion, with five themes emerging from participants’ accounts of learning and changes in perspective. The research brought together two ways of understanding compassion that have often remained separate in health professions education: lived experience from the perspectives of patients and providers, and psychology- and neuroscience-informed accounts of compassion as an emotion.

The investigators then used the Theory of Constructed Emotion, a neuroscientific theory of emotion generation, to interpret the data further. Participants came from varied disciplines and specialties. The study included people who had both lived patient and educator experience and who described a change in their perspective on patient care following their own experience of receiving care.

Their accounts were subjected to phenomenological analysis, allowing the researchers to examine the process through which compassion develops. Five themes described the learning process. “Learning What Mattered as a Patient” represented participants’ revised understanding of what mattered to people receiving care.

“Compassion as More Than ‘Meaning Well’” distinguished compassion from good intentions alone, while “Providers are Implicitly Taught to Suffer” described how educational environments may implicitly teach providers to endure distress. The fifth theme, “Providers Prioritizing ‘Human Level’ Connection,” reflected an emphasis on maintaining connection with patients at a human level. Together, the findings portray learning compassion as the acquisition of new constructions of compassion informed by patient experience.

This learning expands the range of possible interpretations of distress, pain, vulnerability and suffering while recognizing that desired or appropriate responses can vary. The authors concluded that health professions education can teach this variation and complexity, potentially allowing curricula to integrate developments in emotion science with lived-experience understandings of compassion. Because the supplied evidence describes a qualitative dissertation study, its conclusions principally concern the structure of compassion learning rather than measured changes in clinical behavior or care.

Subject of Research: How lived experience and emotion science inform the learning and teaching of compassion in health professions education.

Article Title: Compassion as a learning process in Health Professions Education (HPE)

Article References: Guerin, N., Graves, D., Cohn, T., & Barron, A.-M. (2026). Compassion as a learning process in Health Professions Education (HPE). BMC Medical Education. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12909-026-10320-9

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s12909-026-10320-9

Keywords: health professions education, compassion, patient experience, emotion regulation, constructed emotion theory, medical education, phenomenological research, vulnerability, human connection, learning, process, Health