The association between conscience understanding and clinical performance among nurses working at education hospital of Arak

Abstract

Background: Patient care with strict professional and ethical standards is an important element in maintaining health-care standards. In this regard, moral behavior of nurses toward patients has an important role in the recovery and return of their health. Conscience acting is suggested to have a positive impact on patients and their relatives. Acting in accordance with the guidance of good values is an incentive to provide good quality care and restricts low-quality performance. In this study, the aim is to determine the clinical relevance between conscience understanding of nurses and their clinical performance. Materials and Methods: In this cross, 194 nurses working in hospitals of Arak Medical Sciences University in 1395 were recruited by random sampling. Demographic and clinical data were collected through questionnaires and were analyzed in terms of descriptive statistics using SPSS 16 software (Chi-square test). Results: The results showed that the perceptions, conscience, and clinical performance based on Chi-square test is not statistically relevant (P > 0.05). However, there was a significant correlation between the areas of health-care interventions and understanding of conscience (P = 0.02) so that 83% (6/50) of the nurses whose caring interventions were at best were also having a higher score on moral conscience. Among the different dimensions of conscience understand, only the moral (ethical) conscience showed a significant relationship with nursing care interventions is (P = 0.03), so that 75 (9.46%) of nurses who scored good in terms of moral (ethical) conscience, also showed a desirable health-care interventions. Conclusion: Nurses, have the main role in improving the quality of health-care services. According to our results, moral conscience considerations have a positive impact on nurses' approach toward patients in terms of health-care interventions. Hence, the moral approach of nurses toward patients and health-care issues can be very fruitful in fulfillment of health-care organization's mission to provide a healthy society. Based on these results, more intention is recommended regarding the nursery education and training in terms of moral and ethical practice.