Examining the Relationship between Spiritual Health and Self-efficacy of Medical Interns of Mazandaran University of Medical Sciences

Abstract

Background and purpose: Spiritual health is defined as an inner and satisfying feeling of being constructive with oneself and others and a feeling of superiority in the specific cultural framework of each society, which means life and death. On the other hand, self-efficacy is one of the results of self-confidence and self-mastery, which always has valuable results in the behavior and performance of people in different fields, especially in the field of treatment and medicine. Based on the evidence, spiritual health, and self-efficacy have a close relationship with cooperation, so the belief in self-efficacy and spirituality can cause it to be in the level of utilization and quality of self-efficacy. This study was conducted to determine the relationship between spiritual health and self-efficacy of medical interns at Mazandaran University of Medical Sciences. Materials and methods: The method of this research is descriptive of the correlation type and the statistical population of the research includes all medical interns (320 people) studying at Mazandaran University of Medical Sciences in 1402. 176 internship students participated in this study. After obtaining permission, all samples were informed about the purpose of the research. To collect information, Palutzian's (1982) spiritual health questionnaire, which includes 10 religious health questions and 10 existential health questions, and Sherer's (1982) self-efficacy questionnaire, which has 17 items, were used. This scale measures three aspects of behavior, which include: the desire to initiate the behavior, the desire to try harder to complete the task, and resistance to facing obstacles. The validity and reliability of the questionnaire have been proven to be 79% in Barati Bakhtiari's research and 73% in Malek Shahi et al.'s research. The information obtained by Pearson's correlation coefficient method and stepwise regression of the measured item and independent t-test to compare spiritual health and self-efficacy in sex. Male and female were used. Results: According to demographic data, among the 176 people who entered our study, 103 (58.5%) were male and 73 (41.5%) were female. In this research, 12 people (6.8 percent) had high spiritual health and only 6 people (3.4 percent) had low spiritual health. In general, the students' spiritual scores vary between 30 and 114, and the average was 78.71±34.16. 146 people (84.4%) had high self-efficacy 25 people (14.5%) had medium self-efficacy and finally, only 2 people (1.2%) had low self-efficacy. The self-efficacy score of the participants in the present study is between 0 and 85 with an average of 60.11±12.38. There is a significant relationship between the religious part and the existential part of spiritual health with self-efficacy (P=0.001 and P<0.000, respectively). In addition, the results of the independent t-test showed that the spiritual health of female interns is higher than that of men. However, in the self-efficacy component, female interns scored lower than male interns. Conclusion: Considering the meaningful correlation between spiritual health and self-efficacy, it is appropriate to design spiritual education through the elements of spiritual curriculum in educational curricula, which will lead to the development of all-round learning. In medical education, to improve the level of self-efficacy of interns, it is possible to use the strengthening of the belief base, and it is also suggested to hold training courses to improve spiritual well-being and self-efficacy beliefs along with providing appropriate educational content.

Keywords

• spiritual health
• self-efficacy
• medical interns