If you are curious about nursing ethics, and wonder what it is, you are at the right website.

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Nursing Ethics is

the professional ethics of nursing, that is, the native ethics that arose from within the community and tradition of nursing at the very start of modern nursing. Modern nursing and its ethics became established and developed hand-in hand, dating from the 1860s. Nursing ethics is well over 100 years old, and has its own expansive and rich body of ethical literature, with over 100 textbooks and editions between 1900 and 1964, hundreds of journal articles, International Council of Nurses (ICN) speeches on ethics, ethics committee minutes, commencement addresses, state boards of nursing ethics education requirements, and much more. This is not uniquely a US phenomenon. From 1900 onward, many of the ICN member nations had their own national ethics committee and curricular requirements for ethics education in nursing. This body of literature was largely lost in the US in the transition of nursing education from hospital programs to colleges and universities. The textbooks were not accessioned by university libraries, and ethics education was removed from nursing and given to departments of philosophy and theology, at the moment in time that bioethics began to coalesce as a discipline from the mid-1960s to the 1980s. Though the ANA Code of Ethics for Nurses is the distillation of nursing’s professional ethics, and a shadow of that body of knowledge that had been lost, nurses, hungry for ethics education to address clinical practice, brought bioethics into nursing. But the hunger for ethics was not entirely satisfied by bioethics, and scholars began to point us back to our native professional ethics, our nursing community’s own source of ethical knowing.

In very recent years, the interest in reclaiming and renewing nursing ethics for nursing practice today has accelerated, intensified, and expanded. The Society for Nursing Ethics International is a reflection of that increased interest, and of the desire of scholars, educators, practitioners, researchers — nurses in every role and setting– to network and collaborate on nursing ethics.

This website offers the opportunity to learn about nursing ethics, and how to apply it in practice, how to teach it, and domains of research that might be pursued, how it might influence policy formation, and more. It also offers the opportunity to connect with similarly interested colleagues. Come and join us through the “subscribe” button on any page, or cruise the website without subscribing, whichever you choose. Additional resources, information, and links will continue to be added to this website. All resources on this website are open to anyone interested in nursing ethics.

You are most welcome here. Come, join in the conversation! 🎉