Objective: Resilience and clinical competence are two important components of providing nursing care to patients. The goal was to determine the correlation between clinical competence and resilience in the nurses at Babol University of Medical Sciences. Methods: This descriptive and correlational study was conducted in 2019-20. A total of 424 nurses working in the intensive care units and general wards of six hospitals affiliated with Babol University of Medical Sciences were selected using the stratified sampling technique. Liou’s Nursing Clinical Competence Questionnaire was used to assess the clinical competence of the nurses, and Connor-Davidson Resilience Scale was used to assess the nurses’ resilience. The descriptive statistics, Pearson’s correlation coefficient, t student, and one-way ANOVA methods were used in data analysis. Results: The mean score on the seven dimensions of clinical competence was high (174.8624.19). The nurses had the highest mean scores on “clinical care” and “management and leadership” dimensions (4.7731.50, 4.728.61) in the order mentioned. They also had the lowest mean scores on the “mentoring and teaching” and “professional progress” dimensions in the order mentioned (3.5319.10, 3.4119.14). The meanstandard deviation of the nurses’ resilience score was 73.3612.66. The results of Pearson’s correlation test indicated a positive significant relationship between all clinical competence dimensions and nurses’ resilience (p<0.001, r=0.493). Conclusion: Given the strong relationship between resilience and clinical competence, nursing managers are recommended to carry out proper planning to improve the clinical competence and resilience of nurses.

BACKGROUND: Critical thinking has been acknowledged as a key component of clinical decision-making and professional competency. Therefore, it is of great importance to reflect on how critical thinking is acquired and investigate its determinants, including self-esteem, in nursing education. The present study was thus to assess the correlation between critical thinking and self-esteem in nursing students. MATERIALS AND METHODS: This descriptive correlational study was fulfilled in 2019 on 276 nursing students selected via the random sampling method. For this purpose, Ricketts' Critical Thinking Disposition Questionnaire and Eysenck's Self-Esteem Scale were employed to collect the data, which were then analyzed using the SPSS Statistics (ver. 22) software along with independent-samples t-test, Pearson correlation coefficient, and one-way analysis of variance, considering the significance level of P < 0.05. RESULTS: The study findings showed a significant correlation between critical thinking and self-esteem (r = 0.529, P < 0.001) as well as self-esteem and critical thinking dispositions, that is, commitment, perfectionism, and creativity (r = 0.40, P < 0.001). Moreover, these dispositions had a significantly increasing trend during various academic years, but the difference was not significant with regard to perfectionism (P < 0.001). CONCLUSION: Given the positive correlation between self-esteem and critical thinking, commitment, perfectionism, and creativity in nursing students, it is essential to develop self-esteem skills in such students, using appropriate approaches to boost self-esteem as one of the important missions of higher education systems. As well, a lack of perfectionism during academic years confirms that it is possible that determinants other than educational environments, for example, families, are involved. Therefore, managers are suggested to hold meetings with parents and nursing students.