The relationship between Spiritual Intelligence and Moral Distress in Operating Room Stu-dents

Spiritual intelligence is a type of adaptation and problem solving behavior that assists a person in order to environmental harmony and internal and external integrity. The aim of this study was to determine the relationship between spiritual intelligence and moral distress among operating room students.
This descriptive study was conducted on a census sample of 121 operating room students in Iran university medical sciences in 2016. Data was collected using questionnaire for demographic data, Badie´s spiritual intelligence and Mohammadi´s moral distress questionnaire. Data was analyzed using independent t-test, one-way ANOVA and Pearson correlation coefficient using SPSS 22 software.
Ethical Considerations: After obtaining permission from the Ethics Committee, they made informed consent to the participants by expressing the research objectives for the participants, and confident about the confidentiality of the information and the lack of judgment about them.
Findings: The mean age of participants was 23.39±5 years old and 55.5% of them were female. The average spiritual intelligence score was (148.72±18.64) and the average of moral distress from total score was (3.5±1.76) in the intensity and (3.11±1.6) in the frequency. There was a significant relation between spiritual intelligence with intensity (r=-0.356, p=0.000) and frequency (r=-0.239, p=0.008) of moral distress. Among the demographic variables (age, gender, marital status, educational level, academic term, family income and current residence), only the gender and term of education with spiritual intelligence and the age and educational term with moral distress had a significant relationship.
According to the inverse relation between spiritual intelligence and moral distress, it seems that promotion of spiritual intelligence is effective in the decrease moral distress.