The Schwartz Center is committed to supporting healthcare professionals with additional resources on caring for their patients, themselves and their teams during challenging times. Please find mental health and wellness resources here.
In today’s fast-paced healthcare environment, crowded with competing priorities, the human connection is too easily overlooked leaving caregivers burned out and patients and families fearful and suffering. Through innovative programs, education and advocacy, the Schwartz Center is working to support caregivers, healthcare leaders and others and bring compassion to every healthcare experience.
We provide research-based strategies, tools and the support that caregivers need to create and sustain cultures of compassion. Together with our members, partners and other supporters, we are bringing our vision to light by helping caregivers, healthcare leaders and others across all sectors of healthcare experience and share compassion through their work and in their organizations and communities. We are making compassion a priority for every healthcare organization across the country and around the world.
We are committed to diversity, equity and inclusion. Please read our statement here.
These acts of kindness – the simple human touch from my caregivers - have made the unbearable bearable" Ken Schwartz
In November of 1994, Ken Schwartz was diagnosed with advanced lung cancer. His case was riddled with terrible ironies. He was only 40 and a non-smoker. He ate well and exercised regularly. He could have been any one of us.
During his 10-month ordeal, Ken came to realize that what matters most during an illness is the human connection between patients and their caregivers. He wrote movingly about his experience in an article for the Boston Globe Magazine titled A Patient’s Story. In it, he reminds caregivers to stay in the moment with patients and how “the smallest acts of kindness” make “the unbearable bearable.” His commentary has become a touchstone for the Center and readers all over the country and the world.
At the end of his life, Ken outlined the organization he wanted to create. It would be a center that would nurture the compassion in healthcare, encouraging the sorts of caregiver-patient relationships that made all the difference to him. He founded the Schwartz Center in 1995 – just days before his death – to ensure that all patients receive compassionate and humane care.