Nursing ethics and new challenges

Abstract

The nursing profession has always placed great importance on the ethical requirements linked to its activities. However, the understanding and content to these activities has evolved over the course of history. Two approaches have been developed as the principal issues of nursing ethics: the ethics of virtue and the ethics of principles. The first approach enquires into the attitudes that must be held by a person in order to act as a good nurse. The second follows an inverse course and considers the actions and principles that must be respected in order to be a good professional. An approach that harmonises both perspectives must pose the following questions: What do we understand by nursing care? On what ethical principles is this form of understanding care based? What moral attitudes are related to caring correctly? In a modern professional model, the definition and exercise of care necessarily include consideration of team work. Similarly, carrying out a good caring function, that is to say quality nursing, requires apprenticeship on the one hand, and, on the other, the assimilation of the attitudes that are required in a person involved in caring. Both elements improve the capacity of the professionals to prevent and resolve ethical conflicts in the practice of care.