Abstract
Abstract: Introduction and aim: teamwork is a vital part of nursing responsibilities and roles and is very important in patient care and treatment system. Considering the complexity of Intensive care unit and the unique working conditions of nurses in this unit, cooperation and teamwork are of particular importance. Studies show that most nurses do not have the necessary preparation for team work and this causes interference in work, rework and waste of time and resources in working conditions. Therefore, considering the need to improve emotional intelligence to improve the quality of nursing care and the lack of related studies this study was conducted with the aim of investigating the effect of the implementation of an empowerment program based on emotional intelligence on the professional competence of nurses in Intensive care units. Methods: This two-group semi-experimental study was conducted in the intensive care unit of Shahrekord educational hospitals in 2023. Sampling was done by multi-stage sampling method. In this way, the number of samples in each unit was determined according to the number of nurses in each unit, and then the samples were selected and distributed into two groups. First, demographic and teamwork measurement tool were completed by self-report method by both groups. Then care empowerment program based on emotional intelligence was held in the form of a 4-day online workshop (2 hours per day) for the intervention group and after intervention, the questionnaires were completed again by two groups. The collected data were analyzed by spss21 software through statistical tests including paired t, independent t, etc. Findings: The results showed that two groups had no statistically significant differences with each other in terms of demographic variables. Teamwork ability variables were also in the control group with the mean and standard deviation (141.9±19.8) and in the intervention group (144.5±16.5), which were not statistically significant at the beginning of the study (p = 0.59). but after intervention there was a significant increase in the intervention group compared to the control group (p=0.001). Conclusion: empowerment program based on emotional intelligence can increase the self-confidence and teamwork ability of nurses in intensive care unit and can be considered as a major strategy to improve the quality of nursing services. therefore, it is recommended that nurses, administrators, and other members of the healthcare system use these results to improve nurses’ competencies through in-service training.