Compassion in Dietetic Practice: Perceptions of Graduate Nutrition Students

Purpose: To explore how compassion is constructed and understood in dietetic practice by graduate nutrition students and recent graduates at an Atlantic Canadian university. The study examined how participants discursively positioned compassion within professional identities and everyday nutrition and dietetic work. Methods: Seventeen participants completed semi-structured qualitative interviews. Using a six-step thematic analysis and participant member checking, we identified patterns in how compassion was described, practiced, and constrained. Results: Five organizing themes were produced: manifestations of compassion, benefits of compassion, manifestations of a lack of compassion, consequences of a lack of compassion, and self-compassion. Participants described compassion as a relational practice enacted through attentiveness, exercising nonjudgement, and maintaining accountability within institutional and professional constraints. Compassion functioned as both a practice of connection and a form of regulation, shaping understandings of care. Conclusions: Compassion in dietetic practice is produced through discourses of professionalism, care, and institutional efficiency rather than existing as a fixed personal quality. Understanding these dynamics can inform educational and organizational approaches that recognize compassion as relational work shaped by context, power, and available time and resources.