Abstract
This chapter investigates the means through which compassionate health care was extended through communicative behaviors by Philippine General Hospital (PGH) health care providers dedicated to Violence Against Women (VAW) patients. The study was conducted at PGH, a government-funded public hospital that caters to about 600,000 patients every year, most of whom come from poor economic backgrounds, and is recognized as one of the Philippine’s public hospitals that has a working Women’s Desk. With the aim of contextualizing the studies on compassion to the local health care culture and system, the study used as a lens the works of Virgilio Enriquez and F. Landa Jocano on Kapwa, with the aid of the Transactional Model of Compassion developed by Fernando III and Consedine (J Pain Symptom Manag 48:289–298, 2014), Van der Cingel’s (Nurse Educ Today 34:1253–1257) dimensions of compassion, and Way and Tracy’s (Commun Monogr 79:292–315, 2012) reconceptualization of compassion.
Through a series of in-depth interviews among two male Emergency Room surgeons, two female obstetrician-gynecologists, and two female social workers at the Women’s Desk—all of whom have constantly attended to VAW patients—the study found that PGH health care providers are able to deliver compassionate health care to VAW victims through recognition, relation, (re)action, and empowerment. The providers also view compassion as Kapwa, Pakikiramdam, Kagandahang-Loob, Asal, virtue, and a dichotomy between call of duty and social responsibility. However, their service is affected by various factors and is inhibited by different organizational/structural and socio-cultural factors.
The study recommends various courses of action, including the amendment in government policies, proper budget allocation, and a rehabilitation of socio-cultural influences that marginalize women with the aim of empowering women and bringing about social justice to those who have been violated by the system.
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Embate, J.M., Ordinario, M.C., Batu, A. (2019). The Kapwa in Compassion: Examining Compassionate Health Care for Violence Against Women (VAW) Victims Among PGH Health Care Providers. In: Dutta, M.J., Zapata, D.B. (eds) Communicating for Social Change. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-2005-7_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-2005-7_5
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