Emotional Intelligence of Future Physicians Who Tend to Hide Professional Mistakes

The purpose of the article is to present the results of testing the emotional intelligence of the future physicians who tend to hide professional mistakes. The article is based on the study involving 129 students who are studying in the specialties “Medical business”, “Medical psychology”, “Pediatrics”, “Dentistry” at the medical-psychological, dental and medical faculties of the O.O. Bohomolets National Medical University. During the study, the following methods were used: 1) The Error-Oriented Motivation Scale (EOMS) in order to measure a tendency to hide professional mistakes; 2) The Emotional Intelligence Scale in order to determine the level of emotional intelligence. Statistical processing of the study results was performed using 1) descriptive statistics (percentages, arithmetic means, standard deviations); 2) Student’s T-test to compare the emotional intelligence level in the groups of future physicians with different levels of propensity to hide professional mistakes. The study has found that a significant number of future physicians (53.5%) showed a tendency to hide their professional mistakes. The respondents in this group are characterized with low and medium levels of emotional intelligence compared to future physicians who strive to learn from their mistakes. This study has demonstrated that the vast majority of future physicians believe that professional errors should be hidden, which, in turn, does not contribute to their professional development; the future physicians who tend to hide professional mistakes have low levels of emotional awareness, ability to manage one’s emotions, self-motivation, empathy, ability to manage other people’s emotions. The development of emotional intelligence would apparently contribute to a more conscious attitude of future physicians to professional activities as well as more common-sense attitude to mistakes, and this poses new challenges for medical education to form emotional intelligence of future medical professionals.