Compassion is recognised as a professional obligation and a patient's right (Baguley et al., 2020). On the one hand, providing compassion-based care has demonstrated benefits in patients such as: increased satisfaction with healthcare, reduced anxiety, increased pain tolerance, improved stress response (Baguley et al., 2020; Sinclair et al., 2020; Sinclair, Kondejewski, et al., 2021; Smith et al., 2017), decreased symptoms and improved quality of life (Sinclair et al., 2021). On the other hand, the benefits of applying compassion for healthcare professionals are: improved professional-patient relationship (Sinclair et al., 2020; Smith et al., 2017), increased well-being and job satisfaction (Sinclair et al., 2016; Sinclair, et al., 2021). In addition, compassion is associated with: reduced healthcare costs (Sinclair et al., 2021), reduced absenteeism, decreased malpractice claims and medical errors (Trzeciak et al., 2017). Despite the benefits of compassionate care (Sinclair, Kondejewski, et al., 2021), the study of compassion has been hampered by a paucity of measurement tools (Gu et al., 2017; Strauss et al., 2016). Available tools are scarce, and are differentiated for healthcare professionals and patients (Sinclair et al., 2022). The lack of a clear definition and adequate psychometric tools has hindered the study and use of compassion-based interventions (Kirby et al., 2022).

The development of the Compassionate Capacity Scale in healthcare professionals was carried out taking into account the phases described by McCoach et al. (2013). First, for the development of the pilot questionnaire, the available scientific literature on the subject was reviewed, focusing on the definition and dimensions of compassion: motivation, presence, shared humanity, commitment and kindness to oneself or self-compassion. The Compassionate Capacity Scale has been shown to have good psychometric properties in relation to reliability, temporal stability, readability, as well as content, criterion and construct validity. Factor analysis showed that there were three sub-dimensions of the scale: self-compassion, mindfulness and motivation/engagement. On the other hand, this scale is designed to measure the Compassionate Capacities of health professionals. Especially to test whether the different programmes that have been developed in recent years, such as Compassion Cultivation Training (CCT) (Jinpa & Weiss, 2013); Mindfulness Self-Compassion (MSC) (Kristin D. Neff & Germer, 2013); Self-Compassion for Health Communities (SCHC) (Kristin D. Neff et al., 2020); Compassion Meditation (CM); and Loving-Kindness Meditation (LKM) (Amutio-Kareaga et al., 2017) [AO1] actually enhance practitioners' abilities to manage the suffering of the people they care for and their own, making care practice in complex settings more sustainable.