Providing care in the home is unique and challenging. Home care clinicians must have the ability to coordinate and direct patient care based on individual patient needs. They are responsible for advanced assessment, patient teaching, critical decision-making, and are responsible for ensuring appropriate referrals to other services are made, interdisciplinary conferences take place, and appropriate documentation is completed.
Although attention to patients' psychosocial needs has long been emphasized in home care, clinicians have been cautioned to maintain a professional distance from their patients. Recently, however, there has been a shift away from detachment and keeping patients at a distance, toward encouraging closer relationships between patients and clinicians (Feo et al., 2017).
Emotional intelligence (EI) refers to the ability to recognize and manage emotions and has four features: (1) the ability to correctly identify emotions in self and others; (2) the ability to use emotions to facilitate reasoning; (3) the ability to understand emotions; and (4) the ability to manage emotions in oneself and in emotional situations (Mayer & Salovey, 1997). In healthcare, EI is thought to improve clinical performance, problem solving, communication, and team work (Codier & Codier, 2017). It is also an essential factor in the process of coping with the intense emotional situations that occur in the daily work of home care clinicians. In fact, EI is a prerequisite of key skills like sensitivity, compassion, empathy, self-awareness, self-control, and assertiveness.
It is important that clinicians first be able to understand themselves. Emotions can synchronize between nurses and patients, leading to a domino effect, where the mood of one person (positive/negative) has a similar effect on others. Thus, our interactions with patients have the potential to lift morale or damaging confidence. Recognizing emotions and effectively managing feelings (without denial) require a calm poise in often-volatile situations.
Emotional intelligence can be learned and should be integrated into home care orientation to provide clinicians an opportunity to understand themselves and the way they develop relationships with others (Orak et al., 2016; Quoidbach & Hansenne, 2009). A surprising finding of a longitudinal study by Cheshire et al. (2020), however, suggests EI of healthcare clinicians can decrease over time, so even if recruitment focuses on training and hiring candidates who demonstrate high EI, ongoing EI training is important to maintain staff well-being and quality of care (Karimi et al., 2020).
Emotional intelligence is a necessary skill set for home care clinicians. Fostering EI has the potential to improve patient care and outcomes, support clinician well-being, and promote team cohesiveness.
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