Page 101 - Human Rights
P. 101
Faculty of Nursing
Adult care Nursing Department
This means that asserting a stronger professional role for nurses requires addressing both
professional and gender issues.
3.2 Nurses and professional ethics
The ethics of nursing has been the subject of numerous studies and publications as wellbeing
embodied in codes and declarations adopted by specialist, national and international nursing
organizations.
As nursing becomes more complex the depth of the ethical framework reflects this.
From a human rights perspective, three elements of nursing ethics assume a high priority: the
commitment to patient care and to respecting the patient’s dignity; the avoidance of doing harm;
and commitment to non-discrimination.
The International Council of Nurses (ICN) and many national bodies enshrine these imperatives
within their codes of ethics and policy statements, detailed below.
3.2.1 Duty of care
‘The nurse’s primary professional responsibility is to people requiring nursing care’
Nursing has traditionally been a caring profession that places care for the patient at the heart of
its role. As the ICN Code of Ethics for Nurses states, “The nurse’s primary professional
responsibility is to people requiring nursing care.”
It is significant that a review of nursing education carried out in Australia was subtitled “Our duty
of care”.
Breaching a duty of care, which may constitute professional negligence, may also have legal
consequences, and this is having an increasingly serious impact on health workers and the way
they practice in the growing litigious culture of many countries.
97 Academic Year 2025/2026
