Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Research Protocols
Date Submitted: Aug 22, 2025
Date Accepted: Apr 7, 2026
Examining Compassionate Workplace Interventions for Employees Navigating Serious Illness, Caregiving, Death, or Bereavement: A Scoping Review Protocol.
ABSTRACT
Background:
Background:
Globally, researchers have documented an emergence of public health approaches within palliative care, leading to the development of Compassionate Communities, a movement which seeks to build community capacity to support members at end-of-life. Compassionate Communities emphasize a social model of care that extends beyond the palliative care phase into bereavement, recognizing the need for continued support following the death of a loved one. The Compassionate City Charter broadens this scope to include civic institutions, outlining recommendations for adoption within workplaces and educational settings. Empirical evidence of workplace adoption of compassionate practices is lacking.
Objective:
Objective:
The aim of this study was to systematically map and explore international evidence regarding compassionate workplace interventions for employees in the workplace or organisational setting, experiencing serious illness, caregiving, death, or bereavement.
Methods:
Methods:
The Joanna Briggs Institute (JBI) will guide this review to systematically search and locate published articles, reporting on primary research. The following five stages will be conducted 1) develop research question and objectives 2) develop the search strategy 3) study search and selection across seven databases and grey literature, databases include CINAHL Ultimate (EBSCO), Scopus, PsycINFO (OVID), Web of Science, ABI/INFORM (ProQuest), Business Source Ultimate (EBSCO) and MEDLINE (ProQuest), 4) data extraction and charting and 5) data analysis and presentation. The JBI three step strategy will be applied to determine searching and selection of articles. Articles will be assessed for inclusion by two reviewers independently and included if they describe a compassionate approaches to supporting employees navigating serious illness, caregiving, grief, or bereavement. The review will apply the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses extension for Scoping Reviews (PRISMA-ScR) to present the results. etting, experiencing serious illness, caregiving, death, or bereavement.
Results:
Results:
As of August 2025 the literature search has been completed. After searching across listed databases and grey literature, 273 studies were identified, of which 261 were removed. Final results are expected to be published late 2025.g serious illness, caregiving, death, or bereavement.
Conclusions:
Conclusions:
To the best of our knowledge, this represents the first comprehensive review to explore the international evidence on compassionate workplace interventions for employees navigating serious illness, caregiving, death and bereavement. Clinical Trial: Trial Registration: This protocol has been registered and is publicly available on the Open Science Framework (OSF) (https://osf.io/wu5jf).
Citation
Request queued. Please wait while the file is being generated. It may take some time.
Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.