The Role of Nursing Ethics Education in Developing Professional Integrity and Accountability

Posted: Aug 02, 2019

• Skylar Mendoza
• Landon Becker
• Maddox Henry

Abstract

The contemporary healthcare landscape presents nurses with increasingly complex ethical challenges that demand sophisticated moral reasoning and unwavering professional integrity. Nursing ethics education serves as the foundational pillar for developing the moral competence necessary to navigate these challenges while maintaining accountability to patients, colleagues, and the profession. Despite decades of emphasis on ethics in nursing curricula, significant gaps persist between theoretical knowledge and practical application, with concerning reports of ethical distress, moral residue, and inconsistent ethical decision-making in clinical practice. This research addresses this critical disconnect by proposing and evaluating an innovative educational framework that transcends traditional pedagogical approaches. Traditional nursing ethics education has predominantly relied on didactic instruction, principle-based frameworks, and case study analyses. While these methods provide essential theoretical grounding, they often fail to adequately prepare students for the nuanced, emotionally charged, and time-pressured ethical dilemmas encountered in actual clinical settings. The consequence is a theory-practice gap where nurses may possess ethical knowledge but struggle to apply it consistently when faced with real-world complexities. This research responds to this challenge by developing an integrated educational model that bridges cognitive, affective, and behavioral dimensions of ethical development.