Moral Integrity In Nursing Essay

Professional nurses standard value is the standard guideline for nurses to give the best nursing care for the patients. Rines (1993) stated that value and belief could be derived from personal value and social values. Nothing is right or wrong. It depended on individual value in each person. In contrast, the poor nursing care may come from unawareness or awareness. It could not know or describe the real reason that based on individual nurse. This evident related to the three component of moral integrity (Carter, 1996). There are included discernment, consistent act, and public justification. It related to thinking, feeling, and doing in professional nurses to represent one of nursing care.

According to previous studies, some nurses sacrificed

The majority of the moral integrity was conducted in western countries. No study that related to assessment of moral integrity in professional nurses was found in non-western cultures. There were four an existing instrument which related to moral integrity assessment as follows: Defining Issues Test (DIT): has been developed since 1979 (Rest, 1979). The second version was introduced in 1998. The Defining Issues Test (DIT): is a paper and pencil test of the cognitive aspect of moral reasoning. DIT was used to investigate the moral integrity in education field which used as a one-time measurement to determine moral development in nursing students. The reliability coefficient is slightly low and may be indicative of the limited range of education level in this research sample (Center for the Study of Ethical Development, 2006). The DIT too was focus on moral reasoning should not correlate with moral integrity (Colby and Damon, 1993; Olson, 2002). Moreover, the DIT and DIT-2 were not represented the moral integrity in term of discernment, public justification, and consistent

The accurate instrument to measure this concept is also needed. Developing the moral integrity scale represented new knowledge that will provide the way for nurses to assess moral integrity in nursing aspect and professional nurses view point. The result from this study may be developed the future knowledge in nursing science, which can be used as an instrument for assessing the effectiveness of an intervention for motivate and improve moral integrity in professional nurses (Kelly, 1998). Moreover, may assist in the development of strategies to promote retention of nurses in the workplace, and improve quality of nursing care (Laabs,