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Emotionally intelligent strategies students use to manage challenging interactions with patients and families : A qualitative inquiry
Foster, Kim N. McCloughen, Andrea J.
Foster, Kim N.
McCloughen, Andrea J.
Abstract
Healthcare students experience elevated stress associated with the interpersonal work of clinical practice. Emotional labour involves clinicians' use of intra- and inter-personal skills to manage their emotional states and promote patient and family emotional wellbeing. Effective emotional labour requires emotionally-intelligent skills. Learning to use these skills is critical to students' effective interpersonal management of stressful practice situations however, understanding of emotionally-intelligent strategies used by students on clinical placement is limited. To address this gap in knowledge, a qualitative study was conducted to investigate challenging interpersonal situations with patients and family experienced by pre-registration nursing and pharmacy students during clinical placement, and to identify how they used emotionally intelligent behaviours to manage those situations. Twenty final-year students from an Australian university were interviewed. Interpersonal situations experienced as challenging, involved patients or family members who were angry and aggressive, distressed, or embarrassed. Students used a broad range of cognitive, emotional, relational, and behavioural (CERB) emotionally-intelligent strategies to manage their own and others’ emotions and behaviours during these encounters. The CERB framework, derived from analysis of student strategies, is a useful resource for healthcare curricula to support emotional intelligence education for interpersonal skill development and building of empathy and resilience for clinical practice.
Keywords
emotional labour, emotional intelligence, nursing, pharmacy, undergraduate, clinical placement, resilience
Date
2020
Type
Journal article
Journal
Nurse Education in Practice
Book
Volume
43
Issue
Page Range
1-8
Article Number
Article 102743
ACU Department
School of Nursing, Midwifery and Paramedicine
Faculty of Health Sciences
Faculty of Health Sciences
Relation URI
Source URL
Event URL
Open Access Status
License
All rights reserved
File Access
Controlled