Resilience in the health care field is a relatively recent area of investigation which provides a way of understanding what enables health care providers to persist in the face of challenges and offers a complementary perspective to studies of stress, burnout and attrition. Resilience is the ability to recover and continue on in the face of adversity. Compassion is the combination of the consciousness of others’ distress and a desire to alleviate it, and is a basic quality needed to be able to meet clients’ needs. Compassion resilience, then, is “the ability to maintain our physical, emotional, and mental well-being while responding compassionately to people who are suffering.”
