The Nursing Portal

Nursing is a profession focused on assisting individuals, families, and communities in attaining, maintaining, and recovering optimal health and functioning. Modern definitions of nursing define it as a science and an art that focuses on promoting quality of life as defined by persons and families, throughout their life experiences from birth to care at the end of life.

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Nursing ethics

Nursing ethics is the discipline of evaluating the merits, risks, and social concerns of activities in the field of nursing. There are many defined codes of ethics for nurses.

Nursing ethics shares many principles with other branches of health care ethics, such as beneficence and non-maleficence, but also has a number of distinctions.

Human rights and nursing practice

Ethics has been an integral part of nursing practice from the earliest foundations of modern nursing in the late nineteenth century. This has always entailed a respect for human rights of the persons in their care. However, early attempts to define ethics in nursing were focused more on the virtues of the nurses themselves, rather than looking at how the rights of the patient or client might be promoted in particular. In the modern era, the ethics of nursing has shifted more toward the promotion of these rights and the duties of the nurse (McHale & Gallagher 2003).

The importance of human rights in nursing was made explicit in a statement adopted by the International Council of Nurses in 1983.

Distinctive nature

Although historically much of nursing ethics has been derived from medical ethics, there are some factors that differentiate it from this. The key difference is that paternalism, which is often a key feature in theories of medical ethics, is generally not compatible with nursing ethics (Rumbold 1999). This is because nursing theory seeks a collaborative relationship with the person in their care. It therefore emphasises autonomy of the person being nursed over paternalistic practice where the health professional seeks to do what they believe to be in the person's or society's best interests. Codes of conduct for nurses tend to be written in the ethical framework of deontology and are therefore based on the rights of the patient and the duties of the nurse rather than on utilitarian concerns of the consequences justifying the action.

Common themes in nursing ethics

Increasingly, the nurse's role is one of advocate for the interests of the people in their care. In terms of ethical theory, this means having a respect for the autonomy of the person to make decisions about their own treatment and be provided with information available in order to do this. So the principle of informed consent, where a person understands fully the implications of having or refusing a treatment, is one which is held in the nurse's mind when suggesting treatment options. (Rumbold 1999) This principle is not absolute as people are sometimes unable to make choices about their own treatment due to being incapacitated or having a mental illness that affects their judgement. This means that the nurse has to weigh their duty of care against the autonomy of the person in care.

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Did you know...

... that the Environmental Theory by Florence Nightingale emphasized how a patient's environment affects his recovery?

... Lillian Wald is considered to be the founder of home nursing in the U.S. and Canada?

... the Nurses Memorial in Section 21 of Arlington National Cemetery was erected in 1938?

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"Out of ignorance of the past, nurses themselves have strengthened the chains binding them with no thought of analyzing the nature of these."

-Jo Ann Ashley [1]

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