Emotional intelligence, cortisol and α-amylase response to highly stressful hyper-realistic surgical simulation of a mass casualty event scenario

Lifetime exposure to stress leads to risk of suffering from cumulative detrimental physiological and psychological ailments. Due to the nature of healthcare and exposure to trauma, medical professionals are particularly susceptible to the negative impacts of high stress environments. emotional intelligence plays a role in ameliorating the risk of being negatively impacted by these stressors. As such, there is special interest to develop and implement training interventions for medical personnel that would allow them to improve emotional intelligence potential with the goal of enabling them to handle stress better and mitigate burnout. A hyper-realistic surgical simulation training session, replicating the intensity of a Mass-Casualty Event scenario, was implemented to allow medical professionals to experience this in real time. Overall, the training led to increased emotional intelligence, correlating with decreased hypothalamus-pituitary-adrenal axis and sympathetic nervous system stress biomarkers, cortisol and α-amylase. This novel training provides, at least, short-term improvements in emotional intelligence that is reflected with a physiological response. These results guide the ongoing effort to develop therapeutic tools to improve long term stress management, mitigate burnout and reduce post-traumatic stress risk after an exposure to a Mass-Casualty event scenario.