Soft Skills for Health Care Staff : A Scoping Review

Abstract

Introduction: Soft skills such as, interpersonal skills, life skills, people skills, social skills, and emotional intelligence are necessary to live a good life and succeed in one´s career. Health care professionals need various soft skills at work every day. Seamless teamwork with interdisciplinary team requires high level of communication, adaptability, and trust between team members. Providing the best care for patients requires ability of listening, empathy, sensitivity, and high level of communication with patients and their families. The purpose of this scoping review is to raise awareness of soft skills among people who are involved in the health care sector. It aims to collect all recent research knowledge about soft skills and their importance for professionals working in wide health care sector. The research questions this review aims to answer are: Why is it essential for the health care system personnel to develop soft skills? Could the soft skills be helpful in health care to eliminate the gap between the hospital staff and the patient? And could the patient get better services and the health care staff get higher job satisfaction in health care through soft skills?

Methods: This study is a scoping review and it started with determining research question by using PICO. The research consisted of systematic data search concerning importance of soft skills in health care professions. Data search was realized in two parts: first pilot search and then final search. The final search was done in three databases: ProQuest, PubMed and Google Scholar and they were chosen based on results of the pilot search. Search gave 1418 studies, and the search results were then analyzed in three stages, first on title level (n=102), on abstract level (n=30) and on full text level (n=12). One more study was added from references of one full text article resulting 13 studies in total included to this review. These 13 studies were read various times carefully and research questions were responded narratively based on information they provided.

Conclusions: Findings of this review show that various soft skills are very important for health care workers in their day-to-day activities. Good soft skills can even help to handle stress which is very common symptom in health care working environment. They also have positive effect and impact on other people, like coworkers, patients, and their families. Advanced soft skills of health care personnel increase the quality of care and prevent many mistakes, often caused by problems in communication. They are also tightly connected with the level of satisfaction of patients´ service experience. Soft skills have positive impact on people´s personal life as well as on professional growth. Because of many advantages soft skills provide, their development is recommendable.