Depression, Anxiety and Stress Management

Leading transformation in health care has a tremendous advantage in improving the services, patient experience and care within the National Health Service (NHS). It also bears the scars and, has had a significant impact on staff undergoing the transformation and, in a large majority of cases, impairing their duty of care to the patients and services under their care. The concept of emotional intelligence (EI) in healthcare, although not referred to or identified as an integral part of the healthcare infrastructure, is in reality interwoven into everything that is delivered as part of a service provider. In fact, EI is crucial throughout all levels of employees within healthcare and not just senior managers or leaders; the knowledge of EI enables individuals to understand their emotions, emotional meanings and to, reflectively regulate these emotions whilst transitioning through change initiatives and periods of significant and, sometimes, rapid transformation. Not all healthcare transformational projects have been successful in the past, some have been more transactional and result driven, which has led to employees feeling pressured and disturbed about the changes that were taking place and, more often than not, being emotionally unstable or stressed as a result of the changes at that juncture. Experiences ineffective transformational change and, the fallout of transactional change initiatives, has resulted over the years in a significant rise in organisations requesting external consultants to deliver stress management, conflict resolution and more recently, anger management training within their establishments. The presentation will highlight some examples of where Emotional Intelligence has made a significant contribution to leading smoother transformation initiatives within the healthcare.