Where Compassion
Meets Ethics

IN GLOBAL HEALTH

Our Mission
We are FACE.

The Focus Area for Compassion and Ethics (FACE) brings compassion and ethics to the center of global health practice. Compassion inspires and sustains us and ethics guides our deep examination of the work.

Our Vision
Compassion inspires and sustains our work,
while ethics helps us understand what to do and how to do it.

Compassion without ethics may lead to unsustainable or even inappropriate action. Likewise, ethics frameworks can fall short without compassion, which enables us to see a whole person or community, not just the parts relevant to a given intervention. 

Social justice, human rights, and equity, are values that permeate discourse and ideology in global health. Less examined are the micro-level ethics, which require us to constantly question our actions as global health practitioners.

Our Work

Compassion Rounds

A quarterly webinar series, co-hosted with the WHO; we gather to share experiences, challenge ideas, and spark thinking on compassion in global health.

Compassion & the SDGs

Along with the Global Health Academy at the University of Edinburgh, we have been working to develop a compassion narrative for the SDGs. Beginning Jan. 9, 2023, we will be launching a year-long social media campaign to reposition compassion as a central driver to achieve the SDGs.

Measuring Compassion

Our January 2020 Epidemiology of Compassion & Love meeting served as a springboard into many new exciting projects related to measuring compassion.

Human Flourishing

Aims to understand how compassion alleviates suffering and promotes flourishing in healthcare settings.

Header photo caption: In Nicaragua, community health workers make house calls in their local community to ensure that all members of the community have access to immunizations, especially flu shots. 

Photo 2 courtesy of Alexander Kumar for the Lancet.

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