Formation and everyday ethical comportment.

T he Carnegie Foundation National Study of Nursing Education has just been completed, and the book reporting the findings will be published early in 2009. This is the first national study of nursing education since the Lysaught report, published in 1970. It is dizzying to think of all the changes that have occurred in society and health care since that time: the advancement of women’s rights, the information technology revolution, the commercialization of the health care system, the changes in managed care that consolidated and closed many hospitals and downsized a large pool of highly experienced nurses, the extreme nurse shortages (especially the shortage of nurse educators), an aging work force, growing health care disparities, a systematic and large-scale focus on improving patient safety, and more. It is not surprising that the Carnegie study concludes that nurses are currently underprepared for the complex field of professional practice, given the changes just listed and the continued underfunding of nursing education, along with the failure to recognize the complexity of current nursing practice. The Carnegie study recommends sweeping changes in the pedagogies and curricular structures of nursing education. In this short column, we focus on improving the teaching of ethical comportment and the formation of nurses’ nursing identity, skilled know-how, knowledge use, and character. In this context, formation refers to