Cameos of Compassion: Exploring compassionate care using secondary analysis of digital patients’ stories

Patient stories have been identified as a powerful tool to improve quality of care. Healthtalk.org is a digital resource (specific health-related website) presenting patients’ experiences of illness and healthcare through trigger films, videos and articles. Data have been generated from narrative interviews conducted by experienced researchers, based at the Health Experiences Research Group (HERG), University of Oxford. Our project explored the potential use of secondary analysis of digital sources as a methodological innovation to develop as a tool for teaching compassion to nursing students. For that, a purposive sample of transcripts from the HERG archive were selected for secondary analysis. Patients expressed both positive and negative experiences of care. Positive themes included: continuity of care and attentiveness to the fundamentals of care. Negative themes were related to poor quality of care; ignoring patient and family needs; and not being available for patients and family when needed. We concluded that secondary analysis of narrative interviews provides a powerful resource for identifying positive and negative patient experiences for learning and teaching. These can be designed into a digital toolkit and used as a learning and teaching resource to develop staff and students’ reflexivity in relation to the values and leadership behaviours associated with compassionate care and positive practice.