ABOUT BOOK

Compassion is an attribute of a person’s affective understanding, which aims to enable, so far as possible, shared experiences of the world’s ills and some alleviation of those ills’ effects. ~Such an attribute is thus of great value within healthcare institutions such as general practices ~and other primary and community healthcare settings. It may characterise the people ~who participate in those institutions; or, it may not so characterise them. The appearance ~of compassion, under certain conditions and even in fragile and incomplete forms, is a kind ~of human excellence, a way of being for the good in community.* Compassion is not, therefore, ~a commodity, to be bought, sold and traded. Although time can be costed, there is no ~line for compassion in any budget. Were compassion to be thought a commodity, one could ~imagine trading it off against some more measurable factor (efficiency, cost-effectiveness, etc.). ~However, our human capacity for compassion, though fragile, tends to resist such marginalisation ~and reductionism.