The role of emotion in effective clinical leadership and compassionate care This article explores the role of emotion in clinical leadership and medical practice and suggests that the Francis report and subsequent debate provides the opportunity for a reframing of how doctors and leaders might engage in 'emotion work'.

he circumstances and consequences of the Mid Staffordshire scandal and the Francis report that came out of it are well documented (Thorlby et al, 2014). It is striking that the report acknowledges that the words suffering, dignity, respect, compassion and sensi-tivity are highly emotive, yet they are used liberally throughout. This contrasts with Shapiro’s (2011) sugges-tion that not only do official reports sanitize emotions but the processes of professional medical socialization systematically blunt learners’ emotional reactions. The commentaries and debates that followed the Francis report focus not only on seeking to understand why health workers, leaders and managers behaved as they did, but in preventing this in future across the NHS and related public services. In a health-care environment in which resources (people, time, funding) are increasingly constrained, a key challenge for clinical and other health-care leaders is to enable health professionals to provide compassion and care while meeting organizational demands, all of which take time. If we are to avoid doc-tors’ stress and burnout, then meeting this challenge is essential. Howe (2008) suggests that in the people-oriented professions, staff ‘inevitably find themselves working daily with people whose needs are pressing and whose emotions are disturbingly aroused … It is critical that … workers understand the part that emotions play in the lives and behaviour of those who use their servic-es…Practitioners need to understand how emotions affect them as they work with users and engage with colleagues’. This article explores how doctors have traditionally been trained to set aside the emotions they may feel with a view that, by so doing, the ‘clinical care’ they provide will be better. However, the Francis report and subse-quent debates raise questions as to whether this ‘scientif-ic’ and ‘objective’ approach, the medicalization of health and disease and the compartmentalizing of tasks to differ-ent health professionals contributed to some doctors fail-ing to take responsibility for addressing the poor care at Mid Staffordshire. While all health- and social-care pro-fessionals need to protect themselves psychologically from others’ suffering and pain, doctors need to be trained to balance scientific objectivity with the risk of objectifying patients by taking a narrow, disease-focussed interpretation of what medical care means.