Emotional Intelligence and Productive Relationships with Patients and Colleagues

A higher degree of emotional intelligence among health professionals has been shown to result in better patient care and improved well-being of the health professional. For nuclear medicine, the emotional competence of staff and emotional proficiency of institutions are important expectations. Nonetheless, there is a paucity of material outlining purposeful honing of emotional intelligence, or the tools for such development, across the literature. Although the hidden curriculum provides powerful and authentic educational opportunities, incidental or accidental (organic) capability development does not benefit overall professionalism. Deliberate curricula can be achieved through a scaffold of emotional training and immersion programs that allow the nuclear medicine student or practitioner to recognize and foster emotionally safe environments. This requires careful planning to drive the emotional intelligence pipeline. Central to this is an understanding of learning taxonomies. There remain substantial gaps between the most and least emotionally insightful that could be addressed by rich immersive activities targeting emotional proficiency among students and the graduate workforce.