Professional and Ethical Values in Providing Nursing Care: The Perspective of Nurses

Introduction: Professional values comprise a significant part of the nursing profession. Learning the concept of these values and creating conditions for developing and completing them are necessary. The aim of this study was to examine the professional and ethical values in providing nursing care from the nurses’ perspective. Methods: This descriptive, cross-sectional study was performed on 150 nurses in Shiraz’s Shahid Chamran Hospital who were selected by convenience sampling in 2015. The data was collected through a two-part questionnaire comprised of the nurses’ demographic information and Shank and Weise’s Nursing Professional Values Scale-Revised (NPVS-R) which measured five aspects (caring, activism, professionalism, trust and justice) in a five-point Likert scale (from unimportant to highly important). The collected data were analyzed using descriptive statistics (mean and standard deviation). Results: Among the components of nursing professional values, the highest mean score was related to “justice” at 3. 91±0. 79 and the lowest mean score was related to “activism” at 3. 31±0. 74. The total mean score of the questionnaire was 3. 72±0. 53. The aspects of the professional values were prioritized from the nurses’ perspective as justice, caring, trust, professionalism and activism respectively. Conclusion: The results show that nurses consider those nursing values important which directly relate to their job. Therefore, understanding the importance of certain aspects of the professional values which are related to the nurses’ indirect tasks requires further support, and it is necessary that all of the aspects of professional and ethical values should be taught during the nursing education.