A cross-sectional study comparing emotional intelligence and perceived stress amongst community pharmacists delivering and not delivering a new service

BACKGROUND: Community pharmacists contribute substantially to public health and person-centred care. Emotional intelligence (EI) may help health professionals better engage with patients, handle stress in challenging situations and, presumably, better introduce and implement new services. AIM: The study's aims were to compare the EI and perceived stress (PS) levels of community pharmacists who provided a new service to patients with diabetes with their controls who provided standard pharmaceutical services and to test the correlations between the two constructs. METHOD: This study used a survey methodology. Well-validated instruments were distributed electronically to all participating pharmacists. To compare the continuous EI and PS data between the two study groups, the paired-samples t test was used. Pearson and Spearman’s correlations were used to test the associations between EI and PS and their respective subdomains. RESULTS: A total of 86 pharmacists participated in the study (n = 43 in each group). The study groups did not differ by any characteristic except gender. Their mean EI and PS levels were 120.95 ± 11.53 and 17.45 ± 4.55, respectively, with no difference between the groups. In both study groups, inverse correlations were found between PS and EI levels, with statistical significance in the control group and in the overall study population (r = − 0.611 and r = − 0.370, respectively). CONCLUSION: Our results suggest that the introduction of the EI agenda into certification programmes for new community pharmacy services should be considered. The results also suggest that higher EI may have protective effects against PS. Additional research would clarify the need to invest more in such programmes. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s11096-023-01542-8.