Factors Affecting Nursing Professional Identity: A Systematic Review

Introduction: In the new age, there is a need to have committed and professional nurses for reasons such as advancing technology, increasing public awareness, and public demand for quality care. Objective: Examining and Identifying affecting factors on the formation of nurses' professional identities. Materials: The paper was a systemic review study that was conducted in the year 2020 by searching English databases Scopus, Pubmed, Web of Science, Proquest, EMBASE, Google Scholar from 1980 to 2019 and Persian databases, Iran Medex, Magiran and SID 1991 to 2019 using the keywords of professional identity, professionalism, identity in nursing, and its English equivalents. Results: Of the 27298 preliminary papers, 17 papers entered in the final analysis. The result of the finalized studies showed that the most critical factors about the formation of professional nursing identity were: Poor team, Participatory and communicative activities, the role of professors and clinical instructors, educational approach, individual characteristic (age, gender, self-confidence, job satisfaction, etc.), ambiguity in the role and role of culture and media. Conclusions: in order to educate nursing students, professors and educators with a positive professional identity must be used to promote and shape students identities; moreover, in order to clarify and remove the ambiguity of the role of the profession, it is necessary to properly introduce the nursing in the community people and try to change the culture of the society towards the identity of the nursing profession.