| Description |
Emotional intelligence (EI) has long been overlooked in medical education and recent studies show medical providers miss opportunities to show EI to patients and staff. Emotional intelligence can enhance patient-provider communication and patient trust, thus affecting overall patient care and safety. Additionally, emotionally intelligent providers have an increased ability to cope with the emotional aspects of their job, retain staff, and decrease malpractice claims and employee turnover, thus decreasing overall provider burnout. This paper explores the knowledge base and attitude of various medical providers toward EI, including their desire to increase personal EI, and their willingness to implement those changes personally and professionally. The methods used to implement changes included a pre-test survey, the implementation of an EI standardized tool (the EQ-i 2.0), an EI educational module, a post-test survey, and a one month follow-up survey after EI level results were given. Testing included Likert style questions that were coded into a database and aggregate scores assessed using skewness and kurtosis statistics. The sample size for the study was n = 10. The average age for the sample was 43.6 years (SD = 11.6) and consisted of nine (9) Nurse Practitioners and one (1) physician. There were no missing observations of the outcomes across all three observations of the outcome variables. There was a significant main effect associated with "Agree" across time (p = 0.013). Post hoc analyses found a significant increase in "Agree" from baseline to post-intervention, p = 0.016, and a non-significant decrease from post-intervention to the one month maintenance observation, p = 0.893. A non-significant main effect was detected for "Degree" (p = 0.06). Conclusions show evidence that concepts of emotional intelligence can be taught, self-assessed, and after education, providers feel EI is important and want to improve. Increasing Emotional Intelligence in Healthcare Providers Healthcare organizations across the United States are focusing with increased intensity on the aspect of patient-centered healthcare (Birks & Watt, 2007). As healthcare providers, part of this progression includes the development of emotional intelligence (EI). Emotional intelligence was defined by Mayer and Salovey as "the ability to perceive emotion, use emotion to generate and assist thought, understand emotions, and manage emotion to promote growth" (Salovey & Sluyter, 1997, p. 5). This was expanded some years later to include emotional self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, and relationship management (Goleman, Boyatzis, & McKee, 2013). This is much needed in the medical community as studies show providers miss 70-90% of opportunities to express empathy or show adequate EI (Hsu et al., 2012). Emotional intelligence can enhance patient care, patient safety, and patient-provider communication (Codier & Codier, 2015). This paper addresses the need to increase EI in provider practice. The educational module and standardized tool will assess EI in providers of different training and disciplines. The results of provider education will go to affect provider practices and attitudes toward EI. |
