Correlation between Spiritual Intelligence and Clinical Competency in Students Who Are Children of War Victims

Providing effective and correct care to patients requires clinical competence. One of the important components in clinical competence is spiritual intelligence the purpose of the study was to consider the correlation between clinical competence and spiritual intelligence in students who are children of victims of war of Hamadan University of Medical Sciences in 2019.

The cross-sectional study was carried out on 145 Martyrs' and War Veterans' Students of medical, nursing, midwifery, and paramedical schools. Sampling was done through census of students of operating room, anesthesia, medicine, nursing, midwifery, laboratory science, and radiology. The data collection tools were Kazdin et al’s (1986) Spiritual Intelligence questionnaire and Liu et al’s (2009) Clinical Competency Assessment questionnaire. Data were analyzed by SPSS 23 software.

The results of data analysis showed a direct, positive, and significant linear relationship between spiritual intelligence and clinical competence of all students (P < 0.05). According to the students' self-report, the highest mean score of clinical competency of the students was related to medical students with a mean score of 37 and the lowest to the laboratory students with a mean score of 30 (P =0.012). In addition, the results showed that the highest mean score of spiritual intelligence belonged to nursing students with a score of 48 (good spiritual intelligence) and the lowest to radiology students with a score of 39 (moderate spiritual intelligence) (P =0.019).

We found that there is a direct and positive correlation between spiritual intelligence and clinical competence, so it seems that promoting spiritual intelligence may be associated with an increase in clinical competence.