[Relationship between spiritual intelligence and nurses' clinical competency]

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 nurses' 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

effect of communicative skills on the perceived stress of nursing students

Background and Purpose: Many studies suggest that nursing students experience high levels of stress in clinical settings. It seems that training of communicative skills can enhance the potentialities of nursing students cope with stress. Therefore, the present study was conducted to investigate the effect of communicative skills on the perceived stress of nursing students

Methods and Materials: This experimental study involved 26 cases and 30 controls from the population of nursing freshman participants from Mashad Faculty of Nursing and Midwifery in 2009-2010 [confidence interval 95%]. Group allocation was conducted randomly. For the experimental group, a 10-hour workshop on communicative skills was provided. Data collection was done through a researcher-made questionnaire of stressors [r=0.834]. The obtained data were analyzed in SPSS using paired t-test, independent t-test, chi-square, Kruskall-Wallis and Mann Whitney U tests

Results: Mean perceived stress before training in the experimental and control groups were 43.69?22.24 and 47.03?14.36 respectively, which suggests no significant difference. However, after training, the corresponding figures came out to be 28?19.66 and 43.47?16.64 respectively, with a statistically significant difference [p=0.002]

Conclusion: The results indicated that training of communicative skills reduced the perceived stress of nursing students