Transforming Healthcare through Compassion

with Michael West, Vidyamala Burch OBE, Dr. Katy Steward, Helen Thomas and Dr. Rachna Chowla

The panel discussion will focus on how we can create hope for healthcare through compassion at a time when healthcare is under huge strain around the world. The panel discussion will focus on the importance of compassion in healthcare, compassion and self-compassion among those working in healthcare, compassionate leadership to help nurture compassionate cultures, ensuring the health and wellbeing of those working in healthcare, compassion from a patient perspective and managing the pain of patients and healthcare cooperatives and systems. The panel will describe practical examples from different countries of where compassionate leadership, cultures and orientations are having positive effects on healthcare outcomes, staff wellbeing and retention, and offering hope for the future. The panelists will describe the role that citizens, patients, service users, practitioners, policy leads, pioneers for compassion and all of us can play in helping to develop hope for healthcare through the deployment of compassion.

Michael West

Vidyamala Burch OBE

Dr. Katy Steward

Helen Thomas

Dr. Rachna Chowla

This event was held on Wednesday, 25th October 2023.

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Michael West: Michael is Senior Visiting Fellow at The King’s Fund, London and Professor of Organisational Psychology at Lancaster University, Visiting Professor at University College, Dublin, and Emeritus Professor at Aston University, where he was formerly Executive Dean of Aston Business School.

Katy Steward: Katy is a consultant, coach and board member, Katy trained as an anthropologist and has worked for 30 years on the power of culture to inhibit or enable change. A trustee on the OxfamGB board she also played a significant role in helping health care in UK develop compassionate cultures.

Vidyamala Burch OBE: Vidyamala is the Founder of The Breathworks Foundation – an international  mindfulness and compassion charity. Vidyamala began teaching her mindfulness approach for managing pain and illness following her own personal experience living with health challenges following spinal injuries and surgeries in her teens. She began to explore mindfulness, compassion and meditation as a way to manage her pain and found the results to be life changing and transformative.

Helen Thomas: Helen is Assistant Director of Leadership and Succession at Health Education and Improvement Wales

Dr. Rachna Chowla: Rachna is a Joint Director of Clinical Strategy at King’s Health Partners, one of eight Academic Health Science Centres in England. She is also GP and has an MBA from INSEAD, where she is also part of their Healthcare Management Initiative. She has previously worked at a health-tech start-up, a large pharmaceutical company in Milan and with the King’s Fund on Compassionate Leadership and Innovation. She is a poet and a publisher, and the Swirling Leaf Press, her publishing label helps poets and non-fictions writers share their work of Love, Truth and Beauty.

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