Exploring concepts of compassion in care home settings: a scoping review protocol

INTRODUCTION: There is widespread agreement that medical care without compassion cannot be patient-centred, but patients still routinely cite that they feel a lack of compassion in the care environment. There is a dearth of research on how compassion is experienced in a non-hospital setting such as a care home, not just by residents but by staff and other key stakeholders. This scoping review aims to determine the body of existing, published research that explicitly refers to compassion or empathy in the context of care homes. METHODS AND ANALYSIS: This scoping review will follow the methodology described by Arksey and O’Malley and the PRISMAextension for scoping reviews guideline to adhere to an established methodological framework. Relevant publications will be searched on the EMBASE, MEDLINE, PubMed, CINAHL, EBM Reviews and PsycInfo databases. Peer-reviewed literature focusing on experiences of compassion or empathy in care home settings from the perspective of either staff, residents (or clients), family members or their combined perspectives will be included. We will focus on literature published from 2000 up to 1 November 2021, in English, Spanish, Portuguese Finnish and Estonian. The review process will consist of three stages: a title review to identify articles of interest, this will be followed by an abstract review and finally, a full-text review. These three stages will be conducted by two reviewers. Data will be extracted, collated and charted and a narrative synthesis of the results will be presented. ETHICS AND DISSEMINATION: Ethical approval is not required for this scoping review. This study supports the first part of a larger programme to understand the importance of technologies in care homes. The scoping review will examine data from publicly available documentation, reports and published papers. Dissemination will be achieved through engagement with stakeholder communities, and publishing results. Our team will include representatives from the different communities involved.