Our Vision
The vision of Adventures in Caring is to give health care an infusion of compassion — authentic compassion that promotes healing of body and mind, heart and soul — healing that restores the balance of life throughout our community and world.
We seek to fundamentally change the way people relate to those who are sick, injured and dying, by:
- Focusing on abilities, not just disabilities. Because… people are more than patients – they are unique individuals, with strengths, resources and abilities.
- Taking an interest in lives, not just bodies. Because… life is more than the body living longer – it is the quality of our experiences and the meaning they hold.
- Welcoming participation from the sick and injured, rather than only doing things to them or for them. Because… healing is more than medical treatment – it is a partnership, a journey, and a spiritual opportunity. Everyone has a role to play.
- Giving assistance as equal partners in the healing process, not as superiors helping the less fortunate. Because… we have something to learn from those at the edge of life – they are not invalid just because they are ill.
- Listening and leaning closer to painful situations, rather than avoiding or attacking them. Because… compassion is more than a feeling – it is showing up and connecting with people in their darkest hour. It is the power of love at work, transforming suffering.
This is how we put the practice of compassion into the service of healing.
Instead of only seeing pathology and disabilities, we call patients to life and health by also appreciating their abilities, strengths and resources. We overcome the impersonal, mechanistic, degrading interactions that demean the human spirit and inhibit healing. We do this by treating people with dignity and compassion, and becoming partners in the cause of healing.
We recognize that the human side of healing is often missing, to the detriment of the patients and the caregivers. This personal, subjective, meaningful side of health care is the counterbalance to the impersonal, objective, measurable side of health care. Both are essential. But in today's health care, the subjective side of being sick - the emotions, relationships, and meaning it has in our life - are increasingly eclipsed.
Technological, economic, regulatory, litigious, and demographic trends are tending to push compassion to the fringes of medicine. Unless we give people the tools and encouragement they need to take a stand for a more humane way of delivering health care, it will descend into an assembly-line approach that treats people like so many units of consumption.
The industrial, provider-consumer model of health care expects providers to endlessly provide and consumers to endlessly consume. This expectation is a one-way ticket to burnout for the providers and helplessness for the consumers. The system is clearly not sustainable.
However, with balance, partnerships, give and take, two-way conversations (the dialogue that leads to good diagnosis), and the kind of being with one another which is the essence of compassion, hospitals and health care centers truly can become places of healing.
Our Goal
The long term goal of Adventures in Caring is to produce the materials, methods, and programs that ensure the practice of compassion for the sick will be reliably passed on to future generations of professional and volunteer caregivers – at a standard that demonstrably benefits the healing process. So that the mental, emotional and spiritual distress encountered by those who suffer from illness or trauma, is alleviated to the point that their state-of-mind becomes an asset to the healing of their body.