Ethics in nursing education

The three basic activities of medical sciences are research, application and education. Despite the high emphasis on the ethical aspect of research and application activities, ethical aspect of education seems to attract less attention.Education is the process of making needed changes in the behavior patterns of people through their own lives in a conscious and controlled way. Ethics is defined as the evaluation of human attitudes and behaviors in terms of being good or bad as well as questioning the things that are good and what is good in terms of conscious actions.This study aims at identifying the ethical values prioritized by teachers and identifying which ethical problems they encounter and how often, as well as evaluating ethics classes in terms of content, duration and method, and detecting whether the teachers have had any training on ethics. The participants of the study are 134 teachers working in ten different schools of nursing. The data were collected through a questionnaire consisting of 28 questions and three sections regarding participant information, education ethics and ethics education.Findings show that although ethical principles were taken into consideration by the participants, they come across unethical teacher behaviors at the level of evidence and experience, that ethics education is instructed by teachers who are not experts in this field and usually as part of the integrated system, and that the content of ethics course differs from school to school. Given these results, it can be suggested that teachers in schools of nursing should be given the opportunity of improving their conscious and awareness regarding ethics, and ethics courses should be standardized.