‘Values and beliefs’ play a critical role in the profession of nursing, and incorporating a set of ethical values within a broader framework for nursing professionals suggests a way forward for efficient and resilient healthcare workers. Ethical values are central to ensuring resilience in the profession of nursing while focusing on improving healthcare service delivery to the patient with patient-centric and evidence-based care. Ten critical values for professional development in nursing include human dignity, altruism, social justice, autonomy in decision-making, precision and accuracy in providing care, human relationships, responsibility, trust, sympathy, and individual and professional competency, which results in building resilience of nursing professionals.
Analysis
The premise for discussion on ethics and leadership in the nursing profession relies on the healthcare professional’s position within the healthcare centre as a ‘moral agent’ with the impact of personal actions on others, along with oneself at the moral level. Henceforth, the efficiency of healthcare workers increases when their respective understanding of personal ethics and the moral framework increases. Personal ethics and moral frameworks have complex natures, sources, and implications for nursing professions, including personal-level impact. Ethical frameworks for moral agents require assessment of the primary influences, coupled with ethical principles at the personal and professional level.
Primary Influences on Nursing Profession
Shahriari et al. (2013) attempt to define and assess the ethical values of nursing, and the literature review suggests critical values to the profession of nursing, which include honesty, commitment, human dignity, sympathy, justice, competency, human relationship, privacy, accuracy, and precision in providing care, and autonomy of decision-making. At a personal level, nursing professionals in my immediate family members are one of the critical factors for awareness and understanding of the profession. Professional-personal life balance is critical for a healthy family and lifestyle, while resilience is the key factor that enhances work efficiency, coupled with maintaining work-life balance. Being part of a family where the mother and grandmother are registered nurses means first-hand exposure to the moral and ethical dimensions of the healthcare profession. My mother, as a director of nursing in a large-scale metropolitan hospital, coupled with two cousins who are registered nurses and work in the geriatric setting, plays a critical role in my motivation to pursue a degree and career in healthcare settings.
The primary influence of nursing professionals as immediate family members is enormous, and the household culture relies on trust, care, helping each other, and working towards the overall goal of assisting each other in pursuing human welfare. Despite the mechanized routine, the element of resilience in the character of nursing professionals is a graceful element of life. Choosing to become a nursing professional ensures ethical values of committing to humanistic values beyond self and relies on helping those in need with an equitable approach. However, skills and strategies for enhancing efficiency and efficacy in providing patient-centric, comprehensive and precise healthcare are also critical for enhancing the ability of nursing professionals to become resilient.
Influence of Ethical Principles at Personal and Professional Levels
The ethical code of nursing professionals requires a set of frameworks at a personal level, which enables an individual to become a moral agent with a critical positive contribution to society (Poorchangizi et al., 2019). At the professional level, the ethical values which guide professional and personal actions include veracity, accountability, fidelity, justice, non-maleficence, autonomy, and beneficence. The promotion of health care for differently-abled, dying, and ill people, promotion of safety environmental regulations, advocacy, research, educating the community, health and patient system management, and participation in the policy reforms effort of healthcare are a few of the critical factors encompassing the ethical framework for the professional role in health care settings.
At a personal level, respect and honour are the adaptabilities of societal norms and values that shape attitudes about an object, person, or action. In a similar way, avoiding prejudices and discrimination based on race, age, colour, ethnicity, and faith is also critical to building resilience at a personal level with direct impacts on professional life. Fairness and maintenance of confidentiality are also central to the individual’s ethical framework of values at a personal level, which explains a higher sensitivity level for cultural acceptance and diversity (Duckett, L, 1994). However, personal values also include core competency values within their respective areas of practice because they strengthen the moral grounding of the (moral) agent (healthcare professional).
Ethical Practice of Professionals in Nursing
Primarily, nurses are professionals working in healthcare services, providing care to patients and clients with regard to ethical concerns and issues. The knowledge of ethics enhances the ability of nursing professionals to utilize efficient tools and techniques for providing care in situations that have legal, cultural, and ethical dimensions. In other words, ethics provide the viewpoint of providing the best care to the patient, which is a central component of the nursing profession. The primary obligation of the nursing profession is to perform the clinical function of providing safe and appropriate care for the patients they deserve. However, the response of the nursing professionals depends on the selected ethical values for undertaking patient care. The set strategies, goals, and functions of nursing professionals are highly sensitive to the nursing professional’s framework of values. Contemporary ethical concerns require counting on the ‘value’ resource of nursing professionals within the practice, and the same values are central to the human lifestyle in society.
Human Dignity
The most critical part of the value framework of nursing professionals is human dignity, which includes respect for the patient, society, and family members of the patient. Understanding the needs of the patient allows nursing professionals to provide patient-oriented care with consideration of innate human values, which includes the preservation of dignity through communication with the patient, coupled with privacy during clinical procedures. Additionally, respect for the ‘belief’ system of the patient is critical to embodying the value of ‘dignity’ within the ethical framework structure of nursing professionals. For example, Pang et al., 2009 emphasize the acceptance of respect and dignity for patients and human beings in general for efficient healthcare service delivery to everyone. The value of ‘dignity’ has its roots in the humanistic aspects of the nursing profession, which relies on appreciating the norm of helping others. Dignity is widely accepted as the core value of the nursing profession across various ethnicities, cultures, and belief systems (Boozaripour et al., 2018).
Social Justice
Injustice is the root cause of health inequalities in the United States. Incorporation of justice as a value of ethics in the nursing profession indicates acknowledgement of the basic rights to health services with disregard for socioeconomic, cultural, economic, and political impediments (Poorchangizi et al., 2019). Social justice within the nursing profession’s ethical code of values reinstates provision for equal healthcare treatment and care, coupled with equitable distribution of resources at the macro level. Equality is central to fair access to healthcare services for all citizens, and countries like Belgium have managed to provide equal nursing care to each individual and incorporate it as a basic right.
Altruism
Human psychology suggests that they want to remain focused on human welfare, and struggling with healthcare needs requires urgent attention. They focus on clients, not buyers, and consider them as humans needing healthcare services to sustain a prosperous life. Additionally, helping others is the central component of the nursing profession, which relies on contributing to society in a selfless and devoted manner.
Autonomy in Decision-Making
Another critical ethical value is independence in making decisions on the part of patients requesting healthcare services. Understanding the value of autonomy in decision-making emphasizes the necessity of acknowledging the basic right of the individual to choose his or her own healthcare services. Autonomy in decision-making means the ability of the patient to accept or reject a treatment.
Precision and Accuracy in Caring
The value of appropriate and precise health care aims to enhance the efficiency of nursing professionals, and incorporating it within core ethical values enhances the ability of the patient to receive the most suitable healthcare. Adequacy in clinical skills enhances the ability of nursing professionals to adequately promote healthcare outcomes in favour of patients through a patient-centric approach.
Responsibility
Responsibility is the core value of individuals with authority, and the ethical value of authority is central to contributing to society with confidence. Healthcare and nursing professionals rely on responsibly delivering healthcare services to patients without compromising the patients’ creditability and other basic rights of the health services consumer.
Human Relationship
Healthcare services are the product of human interaction, whereby two key stakeholders in the services are patients and professionals working to provide patients with precise and patient-centric care. A few of the critical components of human relationships in the nursing profession are trust, mutual respect, and resilience, although privacy and confidentiality are critical to effective human relationships between the nursing profession and patients. Additionally, non-verbal and verbal communication patterns are equally important, along with sympathy, empathy, courtesy, mutual understanding, and friendliness, in both nursing practice and verbal communication. Caregiving in the nursing profession requires effectiveness and efficiency in the relationship between the professionals working in nursing careers and the interaction with patients’ basic rights.
Individual and Professional Competency
The value of ‘competency’ at the personal and professional level in nursing practice is instrumental to the growth of a career, along with the trait of adaptability to new technology. Professional competency relies on clinical skills that ensure holistic and comprehensive care to the patient, coupled with the requirement of a range of diverse skills. Competency paves the way for confidence and trust, which yields the best care to the patient with an evidence-based approach that is dominant in practice.
Sympathy
The ethical value of sympathy in nursing is also critical but significantly varies with culture, and despite the defining elements of sympathy in various cultures, sympathy remains critical to the ethical values of the nursing profession. Sympathizing with patients indicates ‘empathetic’ behaviour towards patients, which is some cultures’ practice of providing care through sharing patients’ physical, psychological and emotional suffering, like that of East Asian countries.
Trust
Trust is one of the ethical values central to nursing professionals’ framework for providing inclusive care to patients. Trust comes with the practice of honesty as a core value within workplace settings in providing health care to patients and maintaining cultural sensitivity through the incorporation of diversity.
Ethical Leadership and Professional Development Plan
The development of a professional, ethical plan with consequences for leadership suggests that there exist negative and positive aspects of a moral agent’s character when conferred with authority, which has its associated power to influence. Shahriari et al. (2013) research also highlights the influences of socio-cultural and economic statuses, coupled with a belief system, which plays a significant role in defining ethical values across different parts of the global nursing community. The most common values at the global level are respect for patients and the protection of human dignity, which have positive consequences for the development of ethical codes and the enhancement of nursing practice. Professional development plans for nursing professionals rely on a framework of ethical values that builds resilience in the nursing profession and allows for efficient healthcare services to patients. The professional development plan includes career paths and acknowledging the need to improve practice on a constant basis (Barkhordari-Sharifabad et al., 2018).
Growth opportunities in the career of nursing professionals embody a professional development plan that guides nurses in pursuing efficiency in practice and keeping in mind the need for constant improvement. The effective organizational culture of the healthcare unit also flourishes growth prospects, which navigates across time with professional development plans operating as a roadmap. Ethical leadership flourishes in a vibrant organizational culture and, at a personal level, represents itself as a role model for healthcare professionals in a lower organizational hierarchy. Ethical leadership encompasses a set of values within the framework of ethical values for ensuring efficient service delivery to the patient, irrespective of the diversity in any form. Moreover, ethical leadership celebrates cultural diversity and provides overall efficiency to the healthcare unit. Ethical leadership also defines the values that they themselves have worked on and have evidence-based results supporting the theory.
Conclusion
The framework of values for nursing professionals suggests a unique set of ethical values which are broadly accepted within the global community and provide an opportunity for diversity and coexistence. The objective of ethical values for nursing professionals is to emphasize comprehensive and inclusive care for the patient. Ten ethical values for nursing professionals are the widely accepted ethical values that can assist me in pursuing the nursing profession with resilience. Personal factors, such as immediate family members working in the nursing profession, are critical for the decision to pursue a nursing career, which requires building a strong relationship between the nursing professionals and patients. At the professional level, the ethical values of trust, confidentiality, patient-centric care delivery, and working resiliently are required to achieve greater milestones.
References
Barkhordari-Sharifabad, M., Ashktorab, T., & Atashzadeh-Shoorideh, F. (2018). Ethical leadership outcomes in nursing: A qualitative study. Nursing ethics, 25(8), 1051-1063.
Boozaripour, M., Abbaszadeh, A., Shahriari, M., & Borhani, F. (2018). Ethical values in nurse education perceived by students and educators. Nursing ethics, 25(2), 253-263.
Pang, D., Senaratana, W., Kunaviktikul, W., Klunklin, A., & McElmurry, B. J. (2009). Nursing values in China: The expectations of registered nurses. Nursing & health sciences, 11(3), 312-317.
Poorchangizi, B., Borhani, F., Abbaszadeh, A., Mirzaee, M., & Farokhzadian, J. (2019). The importance of professional values from nursing students’ perspective. BMC Nursing, 18(1), 1-7.
Shahriari, M., Mohammadi, E., Abbaszadeh, A., & Bahrami, M. (2013). Nursing ethical values and definitions: A literature review. Iranian journal of nursing and midwifery research, 18(1), 1.
Duckett, L. J., & Ryden, M. B. (1994). Education for ethical nursing practice. Moral development in the professions: Psychology and applied ethics, 51-69.
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