The importance of professional values from clinical nurses’ perspective in hospitals of a medical university in Iran

BACKGROUND Today, nurses are required to have knowledge and awareness concerning professional values as standards to provide safe and high-quality ethical care. Nurses' perspective on professional values affects decision-making and patient care. Therefore, the present study aimed to investigate the importance of professional values from clinical nurses' perspective. METHODS The present cross-sectional study was conducted in 2016 in four educational hospitals of Kerman University of Medical Sciences, Iran. Data were collected via the Persian version of Nursing Professional Values Scale-Revised (NPVS-R) by Weis and Schank. Sampling was conducted through the use of stratified random sampling method and 250 clinical nurses participated in the study. RESULTS Results indicated that the total score of the nurses' professional values was high. (102.57 ± 11.94). From nurses' perspective items such as "Maintaining confidentiality of patients" and "Safeguarding patients' right to privacy" had more importance; however, "Recognizing role of professional nursing associations in shaping healthcare policy" and "Participating in nursing research and/or implementing research findings appropriate to practice had less importance. A statistically significant relationship was observed between NPVS-R mean scores and nurses' age, work experience as well as participation in professional ethical training (P < 0.05). CONCLUSIONS Although the total score related to the clinical nurses' perspective on professional values was high, the importance of certain values was at a lower level. Owing to the emerging ethical challenges, it is indispensable to design educational programs in order to improve nurses' awareness and understanding of the comprehensive importance of professional values. Furthermore, it is recommended that mixed methods studies should be conducted in order to design an instrument to evaluate the use of values in nursing practice.