New concept in clinical care: Proposal of a moral intelligence scale

Abstract

Effective communication, especially of those health professionals in management positions, contributes to the entire process of treating patients and can transform the quality of service into the processes of diagnosis, treatment and care. Managers with moral intelligence are able to distinguish right from wrong and can facilitate the relationship between health professionals and patients. The purpose of this study is to develop a scale to measure moral intelligence. The measurement tool created by the Lawshe method was applied to 789 health professionals. Following the calculations of the Content Validity Ratio and the Content Validity Index, the scale included 77 items. After applying it, with the subsequent exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis, the scale received its final form with 47 items. The Cα value of the scale is 0.966. The scale has seven dimensions, and they have been defined as “equality”, “empathy”, “moral intelligence”, “justice”, “tolerance”, “self-control” and “kindness”. The Cα values for these dimensions are determined respectively as 0.922, 0.910, 0.874, 0.859, 0.799, 0.840 and 0.772; demonstrating that the scale allows to study the moral intelligence of nurses and doctors. The scale developed had high Cronbach alpha values for each component and element, indicating that the scale provides a survey with high validity to measure the moral intelligence of doctors and nurses. Factor analysis shows a statistically valid distribution of items and components.Taking into account the moral intelligence parameters in the provision of health services will contribute to accurately diagnose disorders, reduce patient anxiety, ensure a shorter hospital stay, reduce the number of patients transferred to other health centers, to prevent negligence, save time and achieve better workforce planning.