Elsevier

Journal of Professional Nursing

Volume 21, Issue 1, January–February 2005, Pages 46-51
Journal of Professional Nursing

Original article
Teaching Core Nursing Values

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.profnurs.2004.11.001Get rights and content

Nursing is a caring profession. Caring encompasses empathy for and connection with people. Teaching and role-modeling caring is a nursing curriculum challenge. Caring is best demonstrated by a nurse's ability to embody the five core values of professional nursing. Core nursing values essential to baccalaureate education include human dignity, integrity, autonomy, altruism, and social justice. The caring professional nurse integrates these values in clinical practice. Strategies for integrating and teaching core values are outlined and outcomes of value-based nursing education are described. Carefully integrated values education ensures that the legacy of caring behavior embodied by nurses is strengthened for the future nursing workforce.

Section snippets

Theoretical Perspective on Value-Based Nursing Education

Value-based nursing education appeals to the moral and character development of students. Teaching values requires a conscious connection between the knower and the known (Liaschenko, 1999). This principle requires students to connect with the faculty on value-based issues of importance to them, and visa versa. To do so, faculty members advocate for both a universalist view and a particularist view of moral development (Fahrenwald, 2003). The universalist view specifies that moral reasoning is

Organization of the Undergraduate Curriculum

The conceptual framework for the undergraduate program is derived from The Essentials of Baccalaureate Nursing Education (AACN, 1998). Caring is described as professional behavior that uses both art and science to address all dimensions of the client in nursing practice. Caring “encompasses the nurse's empathy for and connection with the patient (i.e., client), as well as the ability to translate these affective characteristics into compassionate, sensitive, appropriate care” (AACN, 1998, p.

Conclusion

Nursing faculty members are challenged to teach core nursing values that embody the caring professional nurse. Purposeful integration of value-based education throughout all nursing courses in a baccalaureate education program is essential to ensure that nursing students apply the abstract values of human dignity, integrity, autonomy, altruism, and social justice in clinical practice. Values integration throughout the curriculum provides the conceptual, moral, and practical learning necessary

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