Compassion training in healthcare: Exploring new horizons to prevent empathic distress, reduce burnout, increase wellbeing and job satisfaction

Debbie is a compassion and common humanity researcher and educator. Her PhD (conferred November 2019) provided world first empirical evidence that viewing common humanity scenarios increases the level of compassion in healthcare workers. Debbie is an emerging international leader in the compassion training space and developed the award-winning Monash University “Compassion Training for Healthcare Workers” self-paced online course which has had over 2000 healthcare workers and students complete it to date. It is now compulsory curriculum for medical students at Monash University and Warwick University (UK). The course has attracted bulk enrolments from a range of major health networks and is attracting interest internationally. Debbie’s research interests include compassion, empathy, burnout, empathic distress, mental health, wellbeing, resilience and health professions education. Debbie is interested in quantitative and qualitative approaches to research. She is a contributor to $600,000 of grant funding. Debbie has new projects on the following topics available: 1. The “Compassion Training for Healthcare Workers” online course has 3 years of post feedback survey data from course participants that needs to be analysed. 2. A significant amount of discussion forum posts on various compassion course runs (to healthcare workers, medical students, paramedics) that needs to be thematically analysed. 3. The potential to work with a data science engineer to see if AI can match themes from qualitative thematic analysis. 4. The Compassion Training course is compulsory curriculum for final year medical students at Monash University. It is delivered mid March to mid April every year. There is scope to embed a small qualitative research project on the 2026 course run and interview students about what they found useful in the course. All projects will involve co-supervision with Prof Aron Shlonsky at Monash University School of Primary and Allied Health Care School (Social Work). He is also the Director of Data Matters: Social Welfare Analytics Research at Monash (https://www.monash.edu/medicine/spahc/socialwork/datamatters/home) and is a Research Associate at the Centre for Evidence and Implementation (https://www.ceiglobal.org/). Professor Shlonsky graduated from UC Berkeley with a doctorate in social welfare (2002) and a master’s degree in public health (2000). Shlonsky is known internationally for his work in the generation, synthesis and implementation of evidence to inform practice and policy in social services. He is Co-Author with Bianca Albers and Robyn Mildon of Implementation Science 3.0 (Springer, 2020) and is Co-Editor with Emily Keddell of The Sage Handbook of Decision Making, Assessment and Risk in Social Work – Professional Judgement Section. Shlonsky has authored and co-authored over 150 other books, peer- reviewed articles and government reports social services and allied health and has conducted numerous evaluations as part of council grants, competitive government tenders, and other engagements with foundations and service providers. These include randomised controlled trials, large-scale longitudinal studies, surveys, predictive analytics, hybrid implementation - outcome studies, and qualitative research.