What next for nursing ethics

As professional healthcare practice evolves, care is increasingly multiprofessional, leaving boundaries between professional roles blurred. What ground remains for a normative ethics of nursing distinct from an ethics of healthcare? Many have argued that perceived differences between nursing and other healthcare ethics, often articulated as ‘medical ethics’, are overstated. These perceived differences stem largely from the development of care ethics, but the (narrowing) difference can be challenged by professional demographics, limited evidence, and a movement of ‘medical’ ethics away from its domineering history.
As both academic discipline and normative structure, nursing ethics is visibly and ably represented by the eponymous journal whose anniversary we celebrate. One of the foremost bioethical journals, it is the only one devoted to nursing as distinct from other healthcare practices and professions. It has been said to have been the major contributor to the empirical turn in bioethics, a trend which, despite challenge, shows no sign of reversal. Drawing on published and new bibliographic analysis, the presentation argues that it’s not so much the form of the mainly qualitative empirical studies that needs revision as their subjects. Too many of the studies published research nurses and not nursing. As nursing became a profession (at the same time of the birth of the journal) such introspection was perhaps inevitable, but in mature adulthood, the empirical arm of the discipline should refocus towards those who we care for, and in doing so, more effectively provide evidence to drive the normative analysis which will improve nursing practice.