Invisible gorillas and red herrings: A response to Paley (2013)

John Paley's conclusion turns on its head the received wisdom and general consensus about how educationalists might respond to the events at Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust (Mid Staffs) and other so-called ‘failures in compassion’.

Abstract

John Paley began a recent editorial for this journal (Paley, 2013)with the assertion that the ‘compassion deficit’ identified by the Francis Report and elsewhere was due not to a lack of compassionate motivation, but because the nurses and other care providers implicated in the report quite literally failed to understand that there was a problem. Drawing on a forty-year-old social psychology study, Paley added: ‘the failure to help was not the result of a compassion deficit. It was rather the consequence of how the situation was cognitively processed’ (Paley, 2013, p.1451, his emphasis). Paley's conclusion turns on its head the receivedwisdomand general consensus about how educationalists might respond to the events at Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust (Mid Staffs) and other so-called ‘failures in compassion’. He argued: