The soul of care: the emotional life of health care professionals as a challenge for education and training

Abstract

Emotions and feelings have been traditionally excluded from the health care contexts, as they are considered an obstacle to professional impassibility and impersonality. Actually, emotional involvement represents an unavoidable everyday experience for the caregivers and even a genuine professional resource, which allows them to feel and act according to the singularity of each pa-tient and therapeutic situation. This article stresses the need for a special care of the emotional life in the initial and continuing education of care workers, and the importance of an institu-tional and organizational recognition of emotions as indispensable tools. Some methodological principles are outlined, in order to implement educational settings for the development of the emotional competence of the health care professionals.