Emotionally Intelligent Healthcare Professionals?

• Self-awareness and self-management skills. Identifying and self-regulating emotions, managing stress, and evaluating how emotions and behaviors may affect others; assessing personal strengths and limitations; seeking help and making effective use of external resources to achieve personal and academic goals.
• Social-awareness and interpersonal skills. Recognizing feelings and perspectives of others, including those from different cultures and backgrounds; effectively communicating and resolving interpersonal conflicts in constructive ways.
• Responsible decision-making skills. Making ethical decisions; evaluating the consequences of choices, and how virtue (e.g. honesty, justice, compassion, courage) enables us to recognize the needs of others when making decisions; recognizing how individual students can contribute to the well-being of the school and broader community.
- See more at: http://wisdomresearch.org/forums/t/1486.aspx#sthash.NmQwByzS.dpuf

• Self-awareness and self-management skills. Identifying and self-regulating emotions, managing stress, and evaluating how emotions and behaviors may affect others; assessing personal strengths and limitations; seeking help and making effective use of external resources to achieve personal and academic goals.
• Social-awareness and interpersonal skills. Recognizing feelings and perspectives of others, including those from different cultures and backgrounds; effectively communicating and resolving interpersonal conflicts in constructive ways.
• Responsible decision-making skills. Making ethical decisions; evaluating the consequences of choices, and how virtue (e.g. honesty, justice, compassion, courage) enables us to recognize the needs of others when making decisions; recognizing how individual students can contribute to the well-being of the school and broader community.
- See more at: http://wisdomresearch.org/forums/t/1486.aspx#sthash.NmQwByzS.dpuf

• Self-awareness and self-management skills. Identifying and self-regulating emotions, managing stress, and evaluating how emotions and behaviors may affect others; assessing personal strengths and limitations; seeking help and making effective use of external resources to achieve personal and academic goals.
• Social-awareness and interpersonal skills. Recognizing feelings and perspectives of others, including those from different cultures and backgrounds; effectively communicating and resolving interpersonal conflicts in constructive ways.
• Responsible decision-making skills. Making ethical decisions; evaluating the consequences of choices, and how virtue (e.g. honesty, justice, compassion, courage) enables us to recognize the needs of others when making decisions; recognizing how individual students can contribute to the well-being of the school and broader community.
- See more at: http://wisdomresearch.org/forums/t/1486.aspx#sthash.NmQwByzS.dpuf

Self-awareness and self-management skills. Identifying and self-regulating emotions, managing stress, and evaluating how emotions and behaviors may affect others; assessing personal strengths and limitations; seeking help and making effective use of external resources to achieve personal and academic goals. - See more at: http://wisdomresearch.org/forums/t/1486.aspx#sthash.NmQwByzS.dpuf

     Documents listing minimal competencies for graduating healthcare professionals are peppered with references to emotional intelligence (EI). Yet students and faculty alike continue to strongly resist attempts to include EI-related subjects in the healthcare curriculum. Their reasons typically include: 
          • no room in an already packed curriculum; 
          • it's already covered (presumably by parents, places of worship, & earlier education); 
          • not directly applicable to the "science" we teach;
          • outcomes from teaching such "soft subjects" can't be measured; 
          • "we're not training them to be social workers".

     Students continue to gain admission to coveted spots in health-care professional education almost entirely by obtaining high marks on multiple-choice tests (MCTs). Even in science-related subjects, MCTs poorly assess depth of knowledge. How much do we know of these students' self-knowledge, character, psychosocialspiritual maturity? Embarrassed avoidance *** is how admissions & curriculum committees "deal" with these critically important characteristics. Then why are we repeatedly surprised when a proportion of these students "handle their stress" in outrageously dysfunctional ways?
    
      "Ignoring the shadow side of our personalities can only lead to what Freud once called 'the return of the repressed'.”                    Mark Epstein MD

     Comprehensive, integrated Behavioural Sciences curricula could provide students in health-care professions with explicit guidance & practice to intelligently deal with their own & others' emotions - a MUST in order to minimize the frequency & gravity of grossly unprofessional behaviour, not to mention a host of mental health issues, burnout, and suicide. 

     Professionalism includes being explicitly aware of & embodying the highest level of EI and practicing appropriate self-care. Unfortunately, students only take these matters as seriously as their educators.

     *** more on avoidance: http://healthyhealers.blogspot.ca/2014/11/avoidance-is-easier-than-wisdom-hows.html
          fearing introspection: http://mindfulnessforeveryone.blogspot.ca/2014/12/608-fearing-shallows.html
          ethical infants: http://www.johnlovas.com/2013/09/do-we-need-more-nuclear-giants-who-are.html

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