Emotional Intelligence Training Might Help Doctors Relate To Patients

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Emotional Intelligence Training Might Help Doctors Relate To Patients

http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/121060.php

Training in emotional intelligence could help medical residents and

fellows become more sensitive toward their patients, according to a

commentary in the September 10 issue of the Journal of the American

Medical Association.

Patients are less likely to complain and more likely to have positive

health results if their physician communicates well with them. For

these and other reasons, medical schools include interpersonal and

communication skills in their training programs. The JAMA article

argues that medical education needs to delve even deeper to help

doctors relate better.

The four components of emotional intelligence the abilities to

perceive, use, understand and manage emotions are building blocks for

interpersonal and communication skills. The challenge in medical

education is to understand the psychology behind these skills and

build programs to develop them, according to commentary authors Daisy

Grewal., Ph.D., and son, Ph.D., of the department of

medical education at Stanford University Medical Center.

The goal is to learn " how we can improve assessment tools to better

understand how to train better doctors, " son said.

Currently, many graduate medical education programs use self-

assessments, which tend to rely on students' perceptions of their own

personalities. The beauty of ability measurement for emotional

intelligence evaluation, according to the authors, is that it could

separate out personality traits from these core abilities, giving

trainees a more objective assessment of their skills.

The JAMA authors suggest that future studies could link emotional

intelligence measurements with performance evaluations. Graduate

students who score low in one or a combination of abilities might

benefit from targeted training in their weaker abilities.

Grewal and son note that not all educators agree on the value of

emotional intelligence. Few studies have tested the benefits of

training programs, and none has done so within medical education.

Some research shows that emotion skills training in medical schools

has improved empathy and " soft " skills, suggesting that the right

kind of training might help those students who are not natural-born

communicators to learn and develop their abilities assuming they can

accurately read and manage their own emotions and those of others.

" Hopefully, such training will improve the caring environment in

medicine, " son said.

JAMA. Journal of the American Medical Association.

Grewal D, son HA. Emotional intelligence and graduate medical

education. JAMA 300(10), 2008.

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