Humanizing Health Care: Creating Cultures of Compassion With Nonviolent Communication

The tenets of Nonviolent Communication are applied to a variety of settings, including the workplace, the classroom, and the home, in these booklets on how to resolve conflict peacefully. Illustrative exercises, sample stories, and role-playing activities offer the opportunity for self-evaluation, discovery, and application.

Focusing on the language used in the health care system, this manual teaches health care administrators, nurses, physicians, and mental health practitioners how to create lasting, positive improvements to patient care and the workplace environment. Arguing that a crisis within health care is the inability of many professionals to relate to the personal, human dimension of their work, this reference teaches how to counteract the negativity that certain labels, diagnosis, judgments, and analyses can cause and shows how to better integrate a culture of compassion, empathy, and honesty. Readers will also learn an effective framework to reduce health care staff burnout and turnover, create a culture of mentorship and learning, compassionately diffuse “problem patients,” and effectively address systemic barriers to care as they arise.