A robust and rigorous measure to improve compassion and enhance quality care for happier and healthier patients and practitioners.
Learn MoreThe Sinclair Compassion Questionnaire (SCQ) is the new gold standard for evaluating compassion. Built from the ground up with the sensibility of patients, the practicality of healthcare providers, and the science of researchers, the SCQ is the most reliable and valid patient reported compassion measure available. The SCQ has been validated in English, French, Mandarin, and Spanish with other languages on the way.
learn more about the science powering the SCQGain immediate, personalized, and actionable feedback on individual patient's care experience with a robust and easy to adminster questionnaire. The SCQ recognizes real‑time challenges for agile changes in care.
The SCQ Importance measure (SCQ-I) helps researchers and healthcare providers identify which aspects of compassion matter most to each patient and tailor their care experience.
Every patient, all healthcare providers, no exceptions - the SCQ and adapted versions assess compassion across a number of diverse patient populations and care settings.
From individual practitioners and researchers, to clinics and hospitals, the results provide immediate feedback and long‑term metrics to continue growing.
Improve patients experience and healthcare provider wellbeing - the SCQ informs best practices, cultivates clinical cultures of compassion, and allows researchers to assess compassion interventions.
Patients experience improved health outcomes, healthcare providers feel more fulfilled, and healthcare systems run more efficiently and responsively.
Compassion is the quintessential factor in patients' experience of quality care.
Patients are happier, more satisfied, and experience improved health outcomes.
Compassion is not just good for patients, it helps healthcare providers avoid occupational stress, burnout, and absenteeism.
Measure, monitor, and improve compassion at an organizational and systems level.
More evidence and time to improve performance and inform care practices.
Improved patient outcomes, treatment adherence, and lower costs.
Empowers patients and families with data in deciding between care settings.
Capture the patient's experience of compassion in minutes.
Patient informed and reported. Evidence based metrics provides meaningful data to inform research and integrate into patients charts and electronic medical records.
Instant feedback on both patients preferences and experiences of compassion allows healthcare providers to modify care in real-time. Researchers can also use data to test compassion interventions.
Establish benchmarks, identify variables, and identify compassion champions. Report and compare performance indicators within and across institutions.
Designed and accessible for individual practitioners, researchers, care teams, and healthcare organizations.
For individual healthcare providers wanting to assess and improve their patients experience of compassion.
Learn MoreFor researchers interested in measuring and testing compassion interventions, experiences, and variables.
Learn MoreFor clinics and care teams wanting to understand and enhance their patients collective experience of compassion.
Learn MoreFor healthcare organizations that rely on accurate evidence based practices to improve patient outcomes and staff wellness.
Learn MoreQuestions? Concerns? Start here.
Compassion is the pinnacle of caring and is the distinguishing factor between good care and great care. Satisfaction surveys are susceptible to ceiling effects and are not intended to or capable of measuring the patient experience (i.e. patients can be highly satisfied with the treatments they received while their experience of how these treatments were delivered and their interaction with their healthcare providers may have been lacking).
While compassion shares some similar attributes to empathy, sympathy and standard care, it optimizes these shared attributes while adding additional attributes that patients want and increasingly expect. In short, shoot for the stars and in order to do so, you’ll need accuracy and fidelity.
The SCQ can be administered on paper or electronically after obtaining the appropriate licensing agreement.
Since the SCQ is a patient reported experience measure, it should be self-reported and administered by an individual (e.g. research assistant, or clinic manager, etc…) who is not a member of the patient’s care team.
While the SCQ can be administered at a single time point, it was intended to be administered on a routine basis (e.g. after each clinic visit; every 7 days of a long stay admission, etc...), allowing for comparisons of SCQ scores in an ongoing manner.
To score the SCQ, the individual response options must initially be coded as follows: (Strongly disagree = 1, Disagree = 2, Neutral = 3, Agree = 4, Strongly agree = 5). An overall score is obtained by summing all individual items and calculating a single mean score, in which a higher final score is indicative of a greater experience of compassion. A comprehensive user manual for the SCQ and adapted versions of the SCQ is available on the licensing page.
Administering the SCQ across programs or institutions allows leaders to assess and compare patients experiences of compassion between units, clinics and/or hospitals within the overall organization or health system. This information can be used to inform benchmarks for compassion, to identify programs or services that require additional support, and provide patients and families with organizational and institutional compassion scores to help them decide where they would like to receive care.
The decision to inquire about patients experiences of compassion experienced from their healthcare team versus individual healthcare providers was based on feedback from both subject matter experts, our patient advisory group and cognitive interviews with patients. Each of these groups felt that evaluating the care team as a whole was both congruent with the team model within each of our study care settings (acute care, long-term care and hospice) and their belief that a single uncompassionate interchange with one healthcare provider outweighed the positive experiences of compassion from the larger team in patients overall experience of compassion. In other words, according to patients, experiences of compassion in healthcare were equal to the sum total of all their interactions with each and every healthcare provider rather than an isolated compassionate interaction or a single compassionate care provider.
If you want to assess your patient's experience of compassion from you as an individual healthcare provider or therapist then be sure to check out the SCQ-Individual HCP and SCQ Discipline scales which have been adapted from the original SCQ to assess patient's experience of compassion from a single provider.