During the COVID-19 pandemic health professionals have found themselves working in a landscape that has been utterly transformed, for good and ill. There have been remarkable advances, such as accelerated research to produce effective treatments and vaccines, and increased use of digital health care. There are also ongoing challenges in many health-care settings, such as staff shortages, the pressures of long waiting lists for routine care, and an exhausted health workforce. Yet whatever the innovations and adversities, compassion and connection remain fundamental to establishing a positive, healing relationship between health-care workers and patients.
For this year's Wakley Prize essay competition we invite you to tell us about what compassion and connection in medicine mean to you and why they matter. What encourages the humane connections that establish trust, respect, kindness, and shared decision making in clinical encounters? What environments nurture such therapeutic relationships? And what are the barriers—personal, organisational, system wide, or structural—to compassionate care and connection? We are looking for essays that explore the human-scale clinical interactions that recognise and help alleviate suffering and promote healing and recovery.
The intimacy and informality of the essay form unites intellectual thought and personal feeling to illuminate important truths about humanity. For this essay competition, we expect provocative and perceptive essays that show an independence of thought and are written in beautiful prose. Submissions must speak to our hearts and minds. The Wakley Prize essay competition is open to anyone at any career stage who works in medicine, research, or a health-related field and also to people who use health-care services.
The Wakley Prize is named after The Lancet's founding Editor, Thomas Wakley, and is awarded to the best discursive essay on any clinical topic of importance to health. Essay submissions should be 1600–2000 words and should not have been previously published elsewhere in print or online and must be original. Only one submission per author is allowed and essays should not contain any information that might identify individual patients. The deadline is Oct 19, 2022. Entries need to be submitted through The Lancet's online editorial submission system with Wakley Prize selected as the submission category. The essays will be anonymised and judged by Lancet editors. The winner of the Wakley Prize will receive £2000, and the essay will be published in the final issue of the year. We hope that your entries to this year's competition will inform and engage us, prompting us to think in fresh ways about compassion and connection in medicine.
We declare no competing interests.