Nursing Ethics

Nursing Ethics

Caring has long been claimed as a concept at the heart of nursing sometimes described as the thing that distinguishes nursing from other professions . Care is increasingly recognized as the moral foundation ideal and imperative of nursing . What counts as caring at any particular historical moment is highly dependent on context meanings of care are historically contingent and change over time . Caring is not just a subjective and material experience but one in which particular historical circumstances , ideologies and power relations create the conditions under which caring can occur

, the forms it takes and the consequences it will have for those who undertake it . Ethical selves are shaped by social discourses that situate care in relation to broader formations of gender , religion , class and ethnicity as well as factors such as age , nationality and physical location . Since 1900 no decade has passed without publication of at least one basic text in nursing ethics with one of the first discrete texts on nursing ethics being published as early as 1888 (Orr 2004 . Since the inception of modern nursing in the last century , nurses globally have taken seriously their moral responsibilities as health care practitioners they have also taken seriously the issues which have emerged as a consequence of their attempts to fulfill these responsibilities effectively

As professionals working in the health care domain , very clear that nurses like other health care professionals cannot escape the tensions that are being caused by the radically opposing and competing moral viewpoints that are presently pulling the health care arena and indeed the world apart . An important question to arise here is : how can the nursing profession best respond to this predicament ? There is , of course , no simple final answer to this question . Nevertheless there is at least one crucial point that needs to be made , and it is this : it is vitally important that nurses learn to recognize the cyclical processes of social and cultural change , and realize that they themselves are participants in this change . Once realizing this , they also need to learn that , as participants in these cyclical transformations , they are positioned and have a stringent moral responsibility to sensitively and artfully advocate for the mediation of the extreme and multiple positions they might (and very often do ) find themselves caught between They also have a moral responsibility to facilitate this mediation by acting as mediators themselves

Nursing ethics can be defined broadly as the examination of all kinds of ethical and bioethical issues from the perspective of nursing theory and practice which , in turn , rest on the agreed core concepts of nursing namely : person , culture , care , health , healing , environment , and nursing itself (Narvbez Rest 1994 . In this regard , then , contrary to popular belief , nursing ethics is not synonymous with (and indeed is much greater than ) an ethic of care , although an ethic of care has an important place in the overall moral scheme of nursing . Nursing , like other health professionals , encounter many moral problems in the course of their...