there is an emerging consensus that caring and compassion are under threat in the frenetic environment of modern healthcare. enabling and sustaining compassionate care requires not only a focus on the needs of the patient, but also on those of the care giver. as such, threats and exhortations to health professionals are likely to have limited and perverse effects and it is to the organisational...

Emotional labour is a state that exists when there is a discrepancy between the emotional demeanour that an individual displays and the genuinely felt emotions that would be inappropriate to display (Mann 1999b).The study examined levels of emotional labour in university lecturers and compared these data to other occupations. Employing a mixed methods design, a sample of 61 university lecturers...

the absence of compassion, argues the author, is not the cause of healthcare failures but rather a symptom of deeper systemic failures. the clinical encounter arouses strong emotions of anxiety, fear, and anger in patients which are often projected onto the clinicians. attempts to protect clinicians through various bureaucratic devices and depersonalization of the patient, constitute as menzies...

Emotional labour involves management of one's emotions to match the demands of their roles. This emotion display involves just expression (surface-level emotional labour) or experience in addition to expression (deep-level emotional labour) of the desired emotions. Emotional labour is required in the effective, efficient and successful healthcare service delivery. Burnout associated with emotio...

Arlie Russell Hochschild’s (1983) The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling, documents the institutionalization of emotion. While the teaching profession is not prominently featured in The Managed Heart, teachers offer a compelling example of institutionalized emotion. Not only is emotional labour expected of teachers, but teachers are a significant force in the reproduction of emot...

Like most other parts of the Australian public sector, Australian universities have been required to do more with less over the past decade. A key strategy in reducing costs has been the increased casualisation of teaching. This paper uses a hard/soft model of Human Resource Management as a framework within which to argue that increased casualisation of university teaching has increased the emo...

This is the first in a two-part series on emotional labour, a trained and individualised response to help manage the emotions of patients. It reviews relevant literature to define and explore this concept in nursing, and considers examples of emotional labour and makes recommendations for future policy and research. Part 2 of this research, to be published in next week's issue, examines routine...