Correlation between critical thinking and emotional intelligence: a national cross-sectional study on operating room nursing students in Iran

According to the World Federation of Medical Education, critical thinking should be part of the training of medical and paramedical students. Professionals can improve the quality of care of patients after surgery by having or acquiring this skill in health care. Also, Emotional intelligence is introduced as an important and effective factor on the professional performance and mental health of healthcare professionals. Thus, the present study was designed and implemented to determine the relationship between emotional intelligence and critical thinking among operating room nursing students of medical sciences universities in Iran. This cross-sectional study was done on 420 operating room students in 10 top medical sciences universities of Iran in 2022. The sampling method in this research was multistage sampling. The data collection instruments included demographic characteristics, Rickett’s critical thinking, and Bradberry-Greaves’ emotional intelligence questionnaires. After receiving the ethics code, data collection was done for 2 months. For data analysis, descriptive and inferential analyses including independent t-tests, analysis of variance, and Pearson correlation were used. The collected data were analyzed by SPSS 18 (IBM Corporation, Armonk, New York, United States). P-value <0.05 was considered significant. The mean age of the students participating in this study was 23.02 ± 3.70 years, with women constituting 67.4% of them. The results of data analysis indicated that the mean total score of critical thinking and emotional intelligence was 124.10 ± 37.52 and 114.12 ± 43.63, respectively. A direct significant correlation between critical thinking and emotional intelligence (r = 0.459, P-value <0.001) and a significant relationship between gender and emotional intelligence (P-value = 0.028) were found. Based on the present study results, educational managers in the Ministry of Health are suggested to consider suitable educational programs for improving critical thinking and emotional intelligence to enhance the quality of care provided by students in operating rooms.