Resisting bureau - medicalisation: The integration of 'Spaces of Compassion' with the Biomedical Healthcare Environment

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Compassion offers substantial benefits in terms of improving patient satisfaction, aiding patients' recovery, and engendering a sense of responsibility in patients for their own health (Van der Cingel, 2011). Nevertheless, justifying the importance of compassion amidst ever-accelerating shifts towards greater 'efficiency', 'instrumental reductionism', and 'technocratic apathy' represents a key challenge in contemporary healthcare service provision (Dutta et al., 2019; Hensmans and van Bommel, 2020).The proposed project draws upon 'geographies of resistance' literature to assess the local integration of compassionate spaces with hospital services as a community-centric response to increasing rationalisation and neoliberalisation of healthcare provision. In partnership with an NHS Chaplaincy team in the North-West of England, two senior experts in consumer culture, markets, & health studies will supervise a doctoral student's research on the political and ideological dimensions that compassionate spaces occupy and the ongoing entanglements of multiple, and sometimes competing, identities, values, and practices within clinical environments.Increasing budgetary pressures, an ageing population, and greater levels of illness nationally has shifted public healthcare in the UK towards "bureau-medicalisation", what Nathan and Webber (2010: 15) define as, "a potent combination of the [bio]medical model and organisational imperative". Bureau-medicalisation centres on fiscal discipline and net health value; a largely market-centric mission to meet operational targets through executing mass, efficient and generalisable health services informed by empirical measurement and managerial assessment across contexts. Yet the impetus to equate care with targets, to assess the performance of care providers, and to measure and generalise forms of care which, by their nature, are neither amenable to quantification nor generalisability, undermines and limits the opportunities for compassion in clinical settings.