Relationship between Spiritual Intelligence and Nurse's Clinical Competency

Background and

Clinical competency is one of the requirements in nursing profession, for which nurses have recently been criticized. For this reason, health educational systems always intend to discover and improve factors that affect clinical competency. On the other hand, spiritual intelligence is considered as a significant factor in nurses’ success and efficacy. Therefore, the present study was designed to determine the spiritual intelligence status and its relationship with nurses’ clinical competency.

This descriptive correlational study was conducted on 250 nurses of Mashad educational hospitals selected by multi-stage sampling. Demographic, clinical competency and spiritual intelligence questionnaires were used for data collection; the obtained data were analyzed in SPSS 11.5 using ANOVA, Kruskal Wallis, t-test, correlation and simple linear regression and covariate analysis.

The results showed that %53.3 of the nurse's scores on spiritual intelligence were above the mean, and %46.7 below the mean. Most nurses’ (%53/8) scores of clinical competency scores was reported good (by self-assessment), %48.2 of the scores in the average range (by matron assessment), and %53.3 of them in the average range (by the overall assessment). A significant positive correlation was observed between spiritual intelligence and clinical competency, as Pearson correlation coefficient indicated (p<0.001).

A positive significant correlation was observe between spiritual intelligence of nurses’ clinical competency.