دانلود مقاله ترجمه شده مسئولیت پذیری اخلاقی و صداقت در کار پرستاری

Florence Nightingale believed that nursing was a calling and that the work of nursing focused on health restoration, health promotion, and disease prevention. She identified healing as central to the practice of nursing, and leadership and global action as the basis for advancing the health of individuals and communities. Nightingale stressed the importance of accountability, consistency, and truthfulness in practice. She maintained that the nurse’s ability to form therapeutic relationships was predicated on caring, healing, and clarity of purpose. Nurses were to consider themselves role models, maintaining dignity and presence in their interactions with patients, families, and one another and being personally responsible for their moral conduct. Nightingale envisioned nursing as an art and a science, a ‘‘calling,’’ and an interpersonal process of caring and healing across life’s continuum.1 As an early progenitor of feminist theory about caring, she promoted an ethic of caring and healing among nurses as a way of maintaining wholeness, and she perceived the nurse’s ability to care for his or her self as an essential component. Caring for oneself enables the person to be more compassionate, kind, merciful, gentle, and giving toward others. She believed that a nurse achieves ‘‘the moral ideal’’ whenever he or she uses ‘‘the whole self’’ to form relationships with ‘‘the whole of the person receiving care.’’1 She described knowing what is right and wrong as ‘‘inward values’’ and advocated for integrating ethical decision making and personal accountability for one’s own moral behavior into professional practice.1 In her reflections on nurses as leaders, Nightingale embraced the concept of moral accountability: ‘‘Let whoever is in charge keep this simple question in her head (not, how can I always do this right thing myself, but) how can I provide for this right thing to be done?

Despite the current realities that challenge nursing accountability, integrity, and responsibility in practice, Nightingale’s work as reflected in her writings and observations laid the groundwork for the evolution of nursing into a trusted profession. To be morally accountable is to appropriately defend and substantiate one’s decisions based on moral values and norms.3 Nightingale challenges us to know and to do what is right to further the cause of quality patient care, duty to self, and duty to others: ‘‘We should strive for what we can best do and what is most attractive and thereby find ‘our duty’.’’

The American Nurses Association (ANA) Code of Ethics for Nurses clearly articulates what society should expect from nurses and the community of nursing at large in terms of professional practice. Nurses are guided by scope and standards of practice in their decision making concerning an appropriate course of action to which they are accountable (answerable) and responsible. Nurses who are morally accountable make informed, reasonable judgments based on what is right, and they act accordingly. Having integrity ‘‘includes wholeness of character, attention to one’s own welfare or self- care, and emotional integrity reliant on maintaining relational boundaries