Intelligent play: How improv can improve clinician's emotional intelligence

Background

Emotional intelligence (EI) of physicians significantly impacts their personal well-being and professional success with broad implications in health care. A focused training on EI is often lacking in medical curricula. We sought to understand the impact of improvisation training on clinicians' EI.

Approach

Four online medical improv workshops were offered to a diverse group of physicians with varied levels of practice experience including medicine-paediatric residents, paediatric educators, practising paediatricians and internal/family medicine clinicians. The improv training was thoughtfully curated and remained consistent for all four cohorts, lasting 2 h. Self-reported EI scales (pre and post) were captured using an online survey tool. The overall EI score and the scores of three EI components were compared before and after training.

Evaluation

Out of 64 participants, 41 participants (64%) completed both the pre- and post-surveys and were included in the final analysis. Participant's pre-training score (mean:123.9, range: 121.1–126.7) was compared to their post-training score (mean:128.9, range: 126.3–131.3). The t tests comparing EI scores showed that compared to pre-intervention, participants on average scored 4.9 points higher (95% CI: 3.1–6.7; p < 0.01) on the overall scale, 2.2 points higher (95% CI: 1.2–3.2; p < 0.01) on the appraisal score, 1.4 points higher (95% CI: 0.8–2.0; p < 0.01) on the regulation score and 1.2 points higher (95% CI: 0.4–2.1; p = 0.01) on the utilisation score.

Implications

Improv training is an innovative method to fill the crucial gap in EI curricula. There was a statistically significant improvement in average score for clinicians' EI after a pilot improv training programme.