Ethics education in nursing: Now more complicated than ever

Nurses face ethical challenges in their everyday practice. Difficulties getting to know ‘right’ from ‘wrong’ can result in moral distress of nurses. Nursing educators have acknowledged the critical importance of having an ethical component taught throughout the nursing curriculum in order to promote nursing students’ ethical awareness. Yet for all of this, there is very little New Zealand research available that explores what experiences and challenges nursing educators faced teaching such content. A case study of teaching nursing ethics in a New Zealand tertiary education context was therefore conducted and seven nursing educators were interviewed to ascertain their experiences of teaching ethics to trainee nurses. One of the major difficulties identified was the friction between a culturally specific perspective and universalist one where hard-and-fast principles or codes dictated ethical practice. As the interviewees agreed, the challenge in teaching ethics lies in the changing context of nursing and the changing context of ethics itself. Despite such hurdles, the nursing educators in this study were confident teachers who all had positive experiences in teaching ethics to their students. That ethics be integrated throughout the whole nursing programme using textual narratives was a further point of consensus