Congresses
iSMIT2024
MISS4Health at iSMIT 2024
The 35th Annual International Society for Medical Innovation and Technology Conference (iSMIT2024) was held in Cáceres (Spain) from 26th to 28th September, 2024. This event gathered researchers to advance in the field of minimally invasive surgery and their allied technologies, providing answers and solutions to ongoing challenges.
MISS4Health presented a poster entitled “Soft skills training for healthcare professionals and students: are they trained?” This work shows the results of a preliminary survey in which end users were asked about their training in soft skills and their self-evaluated competence in teamwork, situation awareness, communication, decision making, and leadership.
In total, 394 responses were collected. Half of the participants had never participated in any soft skills training, and those who did mostly experienced in-person activities within an academic context. 344 (88.0%) participants were interested in further training, out of which 138 (40.1%) would not participate without receiving a certificate.
Thus, healthcare professionals and students are not regularly trained in soft skills, while they are also interested in such training — with or without obtaining a certificate. This gap will be filled with MISS4Health.
SEIQ2024
In this forum, MISS4Health presented an analysis of the presence the 5 soft skills in the training programmes for specialties in Spain. For this, systematic keyword searches were performed on all training programmes.
The skills most present are communication and teamwork, followed by decision-making and leadership, but only one programme mentions situational awareness. No programme addresses all 5 skills and only 4 address four of them.
Therefore, soft skills have an unequal presence in the different specialized training programmes. The results produced in MISS4Health could be of utility to complement the current training programmes while they are updated, as this legal process might take some time.