Abstract

Clinical education is a critical part of preparing health care providers for practice. The ability to manage self and others are not only valuable skills, but foundational to the development of five core competencies outlined in the Institute of Medicine’s landmark publication, Health Professions Education: A Bridge to Quality (2003). These core competencies include providing patient-centered care, working as an interdisciplinary team, employing evidence-based practice, applying quality improvement methods, and utilizing informatics. Technical skills and knowledge specific to the discipline remain fundamental to health professions education: the skills grounded in emotional competence that are required to manage self and others and that are essential to the delivery of excellent patient care. However, complex challenges inherent in the health care system have forced educators to contemplate the hidden curriculum embedded in clinical education. Traditionally, emotional competencies may have been placed under the umbrella called, “professionalism”; a term often overused and under-explained by nursing faculty when communicating about soft skills, or emotional competencies. Performance criteria inherent to “professionalism” such as self-awareness, initiative, empathy, conflict management, integrity, team management and other emotional competencies commonly referred to as “soft people skills” are typically missing from the evaluation checklist. In fact, these “soft people skills” are often cited as noticeably missing from nursing practice by administrators. Although educators may have less trouble evaluating traditional nursing skills and application of nursing knowledge to practice, the evaluation of emotional competencies can present more difficulty. Articulation of desired competencies must be clear in order to communicate expectations to students. Daniel Goleman’s framework is useful for identifying and describing emotional competencies as part of the clinical evaluation. Goleman’s Framework serves as the backdrop to explore the evaluation of personal and social competencies in clinical nursing education.