Soft Skills: The Foundation for Effective SPHM Program Leadership: A National Survey

There are many reasons safe patient handling and mobility (SPHM) programs may fail, but very little work has been conducted on whether the program leader may be one of them. This article looks at the results of a survey of 128 SPHM coordinators who rated 7 soft skills using a Likert scale based upon the 5 stages of competence identified in the Dreyfus model of skill acquisition. The results were analyzed using SPSS and revealed 48% of the participants had a master’s degree and 7% had a doctoral degree, with the largest statistically significant variances in the respondents’ perceptions of their skill level related to their education level.

Falco K, Monaghan HM

Keywords: safe patient handling, leadership, soft skills, reasons programs fail, SPHM education