SOFT SKILLS AND WARMTH IN NURSING: DEFINITION, DESIGN AND FEATURES

Resumen

The nurse's work focuses on patient care, which requires the mastery of specific skills or competences. Usually, these skills are separated into "hard" and "soft" ones, relating the first to the domain of professional knowledge. The soft skills are "those capacities, dispositions or skills required for the development of a task effectively and make a difference to the other when using a pleasant tone or produces a grateful experience"1. The soft skills strongly affect the expert performance of the nurse in the workplace and the degree of success of this work. In this article we review scientific studies that are aimed at analyzing user satisfaction in health services and his/ her evaluation of the quality of care received. In all these studies, the work of nurses is marked by users as an indispensable factor to be considered for rating the level of quality or satisfaction. In addition, the attributes that characterize the nurse 's work and influence this rating are not primarily associated with nurses' technical skills, but rather with soft skills, including communication, trust, active listening, cordiality, kindness and gentle treatment accompanied by a smile. This review shows that warmth is the most important soft skill that transcends the others mentioned, being the key differentiating attribute of care from the user's perspective.