With this tab, it is our intent to provide bibliographic resources (books, chapters, and articles) and links to websites that will be useful to the application of nursing ethics theory to practice. Thus, this tab focuses on the implementation of nursing ethics theory in practice, that is, how nursing ethics theory or its relational ethics shapes “good nursing” in specific domains, whether in direct patient care or in policy formation or in any of nursing’s structural relationships. This tab also includes research on nurses’ ethical comportment or ethical decision making in nursing practice. This tab will be filled out over the coming months.

The majority of contemporary articles on applying nursing ethics to practice are customarily direct patient care focused and are based upon bioethical analysis and argument. They do not cover the range of nursing’s structural ethical relationships, nor are they grounded in nursing ethics per se. Though the articles may have a reference to the Code of Ethics for Nurses, they proceed on the basis of a straight bioethical analysis (the four principles, from Beauchamp and Childress, of autonomy, beneficence, nonmaleficence, and distributive justice), rather than being grounded in and explicating the application of nursing ethics. Please note that the four principles are not mentioned in the Code of Ethics for Nurses. Articles in today’s literature on the application of nursing ethics, the professional ethics of the community of nursing, to nursing practice is an emerging domain of scholarship. Articles will be added to this tab when possible.

Bibliographic Resources

Books

• APN Grace, Pamela J., and Melissa K. Uveges. Nursing ethics and professional responsibility in advanced practice. Jones & Bartlett Learning, 2022.

Chapters:

• Benner, Patricia. “Practice as a Way of Knowing, in Its Own Right, Rather than a Mere Image of Theoretical Thinking,” 385-390, Chapter11, in Fowler, Marsha. Nursing Ethics, 1880s to the Present: An Archeology of Lost Wisdom and Identity. London: Routledge, April 2024. 
• Benner, Patricia. “Studying Expert Ethical Comportment and Preserving the Ethics of Care and Responsibility Embedded in Expert Nursing Practice,” Chapter 9, in Fowler, Marsha. Nursing Ethics, 1880s to the Present: An Archeology of Lost Wisdom and Identity. London: Routledge, April 2024. 

Articles

• Fisher, Kathleen, Catherine Robichaux, Jeanie Sauerland, and Felicia Stokes. 2020. “A Nurses’ Ethical Commitment to People with Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities.” Nursing Ethics 27 (4): 1066–1076          https://doi.org/10.1177/0969733019900310.
• Grace, Pamela J., Elizabeth Peter, Vicki D. Lachman, Norah L. Johnson, Deborah J. Kenny, and Lucia D. Wocial. “Professional responsibility, nurses, and conscientious objection: A framework for ethical evaluation.” Nursing ethics 31, no. 2-3 (2024): 243-255.
• Tveit, B., & Raustøl, A. (2019). Lack of compassion or poor discretion? Ways of addressing malpractice .Nursing Ethics, 26(2), 471–479. https://doi.org/10.1177/0969733017715791