 My name is Bonnie Stanton. I'm the founding dean at Hackensack Meridian School of Medicine at Seton Hall University and I am delighted to be talking about this ever-so important construct of compassion. Compassion is essential to be successful as a health care provider. The bedside manner in its ideal form is that moment when the patient and their family believe, recognize that they are the only thing at that moment in your universe. Your attention is totally focused on them. It doesn't matter what's going on in your outside life. For that moment, you are thinking only about their needs and your ability to help them achieve their needs. And that's what bedside manner is all about. It's just another phrase for compassion. Long time ago, I was in a mentoring program and my mentor was the then dean at the Mayo Clinic School of Medicine. And I was shadowing him for a week and we were quite late for a meeting that he was running and he was always very punctual so this upset him. So we were racing over to that meeting and all of a sudden this very distraught looking man, young man, kind of scruffy looking, which is unusual at Mayo Clinic, came up and said, I'm so lost. My wife is in the OB clinic and I have no idea how to get there. Now, maybe 10 feet away was an information center and I knew that the dean would be polite to him and I, in my own mind, assumed he's going to say, oh, there's the information center. They can help you. Don't worry. Or maybe he might even walk him over to the information center. No. He said, come on. I'll take you there. And so we went up a couple floors. We got to the OB clinic. The dean asked the physician if in fact this man's wife was there. It was confirmed that she was and then the dean handed the patient's husband over to that doctor so that they could get together. And I thought, what a beautiful example of compassion. He totally put aside his own needs. Then he looked at his watch and said to me, come on. We've got to go. We're really late now. You can't turn compassion on and off. So it's not okay for me to be compassionate with families and not compassionate with my staff, not compassionate with the word clerk. And we're all people. And so sometimes we screw up. And hopefully when you walk away and you've kind of snapped at someone, you realize, oh, I shouldn't have done that. It's a really lovely thing when you see it practiced by other people to let them know that you've observed it. It feels good when someone treats you in a compassionate manner. And there's no reason not to let them know that you appreciate it.