Compassion is the pinnacle of caring and is the distinguishing factor between good care and great care. Satisfaction surveys are susceptible to ceiling effects and are not intended to or capable of measuring the patient experience (i.e. patients can be highly satisfied with the treatments they received while their experience of how these treatments were delivered and their interaction with their healthcare providers may have been lacking).
While compassion shares some similar attributes to empathy, sympathy and standard care, it optimizes these shared attributes while adding additional attributes that patients want and increasingly expect. In short, shoot for the stars and in order to do so, you’ll need accuracy and fidelity.

The SCQ can be administered on paper or electronically after obtaining the appropriate licensing agreement.
Since the SCQ is a patient reported experience measure, it should be self-reported and administered by an individual (e.g. research assistant, or clinic manager, etc…) who is not a member of the patient’s care team.
While the SCQ can be administered at a single time point, it was intended to be administered on a routine basis (e.g. after each clinic visit; every 7 days of a long stay admission, etc...), allowing for comparisons of SCQ scores in an ongoing manner.
To score the SCQ, the individual response options must initially be coded as follows: (Strongly disagree = 1, Disagree = 2, Neutral = 3, Agree = 4, Strongly agree = 5). An overall score is obtained by summing all individual items and calculating a single mean score, in which a higher final score is indicative of a greater experience of compassion. A comprehensive user manual for the SCQ and adapted versions of the SCQ is available on the licensing page.

Administering the SCQ across programs or institutions allows leaders to assess and compare patients experiences of compassion between units, clinics and/or hospitals within the overall organization or health system. This information can be used to inform benchmarks for compassion, to identify programs or services that require additional support, and provide patients and families with organizational and institutional compassion scores to help them decide where they would like to receive care.

The decision to inquire about patients experiences of compassion experienced from their healthcare team versus individual healthcare providers was based on feedback from both subject matter experts, our patient advisory group and cognitive interviews with patients. Each of these groups felt that evaluating the care team as a whole was both congruent with the team model within each of our study care settings (acute care, long-term care and hospice) and their belief that a single uncompassionate interchange with one healthcare provider outweighed the positive experiences of compassion from the larger team in patients overall experience of compassion. In other words, according to patients, experiences of compassion in healthcare were equal to the sum total of all their interactions with each and every healthcare provider rather than an isolated compassionate interaction or a single compassionate care provider.
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If you want to assess your patient's experience of compassion from you as an individual healthcare provider or therapist then be sure to check out the SCQ-Individual HCP and SCQ Discipline scales which have been adapted from the original SCQ to assess patient's experience of compassion from a single provider.