Background: Today, one of the most challenging duties of nursing school is achieving clinical practice proficiency. Emotional intelligence correlates with students' clinical practice performance. Such data are scarce in Southwest Ethiopia. Therefore, this study aimed to examine the relationship between emotional intelligence and clinical performance of undergraduate nursing students during obstetrics and gynecology nursing practice. Methods: A cross-sectional study was employed. All registered 186 fourth-year undergraduate nursing students of Mizan-Tepi University were included in the study. The data were collected using the self-administered structured questionnaires after briefly explaining the objective of the study. The Schutte Self Report Emotional Intelligence Test (SSEIT) was used to collect the data associated with emotional intelligence. Independent t-test, Pearson correlation, linear regression, and ANOVA were computed as appropriate after checking all necessary assumptions and statistical significance was declared at p<0.05. Results: Emotional intelligence was strongly correlated with clinical practice performance [r(186)=0.767, p<0.0001]. There was a statistically significant difference in the mean clinical practice performance by sex, where males were performed better [t(186)=3.27, p<0.0001]. Linear regression analysis showed that emotional intelligence was the only predictor of clinical practice performance (beta=0.219, p<0.0001). In one way ANOVA, the Welch test [F-W (3,182) = 218.18, p<0.0001] and the Brown-Forsythe test [F-BF (3,182) = 150.73, p<0.0001)] revealed that there were statistically significant differences in the mean clinical practice performance among levels of emotional intelligence. Conclusion: This study confirmed that the emotional intelligence of nursing students had significantly affected their clinical performance. This finding poses important questions for the educators responsible for nursing education in both academic and clinical settings. Further investigation is required to assess the factors that increase or decrease EI in nursing students is warranted.
