Bridging the Gap Between Spirituality and Healthcare: It's the System, Not the Staff

There’s a growing body of research exploring empathy and compassion as essential components of high-quality healthcare. Conferences, workshops, and training initiatives are being rolled out across the UK, supposedly to ‘teach’ these vital human traits to healthcare professionals. While the intention is noble, the narrative feels deeply flawed.

The underlying message being promoted is this: healthcare staff are somehow lacking empathy, and the solution is to train them to care more. But having worked in the UK healthcare system for over two decades, I can tell you this simply isn’t true.

Healthcare Professionals Are Not the Problem

Empathy isn’t missing from the hearts of our frontline staff. What’s missing is the space, support, and structure that allows them to express their empathy in a sustainable way.

I’ve had hundreds of conversations with doctors, nurses, therapists, and support staff over the years. And what they tell me time and again is this: what’s often labelled as “empathy fatigue” is not a lack of compassion—it’s a coping mechanism. When you’re forced to objectify patients just to make it through your shift, it’s not because you don’t care. It’s because you're overwhelmed by a system that gives you no room to care properly.

Staff are constantly fighting an uphill battle: too few beds, not enough time, understaffing, under-resourcing, and relentless pressure to meet impossible targets. And then we wonder why they burn out? Why they become numb? It’s not because they lack empathy—it’s because they feel too much and aren’t given a safe, healthy space to process that.

Let’s Shift the Focus: From Individuals to Systems

That’s why I find it frustrating—honestly, infuriating—when I get emails from universities and so-called thought leaders touting new training programs aimed at improving staff empathy. The message seems to be: You’re not good enough; you need fixing.

But the truth is, most of our staff are already empathic. They don’t need another workshop on bedside manner—they need a system that allows them to be empathic. A system that recognises their humanity, their emotional labour, and the energy it takes to care deeply every single day.

Sure, teaching empathy at the medical school level might be helpful—especially for some doctors still caught up in the rigid biomedical model. But for most frontline staff, the solution isn’t personal development. It’s systemic reform.

A New Model of Care: Blending the Clinical with the Spiritual

We’re starting to see glimmers of hope—initiatives like social prescribing, peer support, and health coaching are beginning to acknowledge the importance of holistic care. These approaches take pressure off clinical staff and offer patients more appropriate, person-centred pathways to healing.

But we can go further.

As someone who identifies as an empath and has experienced healthcare burnout first-hand, I believe it’s time we explored spiritual frameworks to support healthcare workers. That might mean introducing energy medicine, mindfulness, breathwork, or even nature-based healing into our staff wellbeing strategies.

In my book, Solar Plexus Nation: An Energy Story of Burning Out and Waking Up in Healthcare, I reflect on how traditional systems failed me and how I found healing through alternative, spiritual methods. The book isn’t just about my own burnout—it’s a call to reimagine how we support our staff. Especially those who are naturally empathic, intuitive, and energetically sensitive.

Time to Stop Blaming and Start Rebuilding

The Victorian model of healthcare is crumbling, and no amount of individual training will fix what is ultimately a systemic failure. It’s time we stopped pointing the finger at staff and started asking deeper, structural questions.

What if the problem isn’t a lack of empathy, but the lack of a system that honours empathy as a strength?

What if we created workplaces that supported emotional resilience, rather than punished emotional expression?

And what if we finally bridged the gap between science and spirit, allowing staff to access holistic, soul-centred support that recognises them as whole people—not just cogs in a clinical machine?

The answers won’t come from another tick-box training module. They’ll come from radical reimagination—and the courage to challenge a system that’s no longer serving the people within it.

It’s time to stop blaming the heart-centred professionals who show up day in and day out, and start designing a healthcare system that deserves them.