Quintiens, B., & Vanderstichelen, S. (2025). Compassionate Communities. In D. Clark & A. Samuels (Eds.), Research Handbook on End of Life Care and Society. Edward Elgar Publishing. https://doi.org/10.4337/9781035317349.00027.
Abstract
Compassionate Communities are an example of a public health approach to the end of life. Introduced by the sociologist Allan Kellehear (2005) in his book Compassionate Cities, these initiatives are said to rely on community engagement, solidarity, and community ownership to change sociocultural attitudes, knowledge, behaviours, and perspectives regarding people facing serious illness, dying, death, or grief. By building social networks, shaping environments to support well-being, and changing policies that affect health, Compassionate Communities target the experience of illness and dying for radical change (Patel and Noonan, 2022). As Compassionate Communities originate from and are reactions to past and current evolutions in healthcare, we situate them within this context. In this chapter, we explore the emergence of the model and the term ‘Compassionate Communities’; we then provide an overview of the existing research in Compassionate Communities, and finally critically appraise the concept and the movement that promotes Compassionate Communities.
