Ethics in nursing education: learning to reflect on care practices

Providing good care requires nurses to reflect critically on their nursing practices. Ethics education must provide nurses with tools to accomplish such critical reflection. It must also create a pedagogical context in which a caring attitude can be taught and cultivated. To achieve this twofold goal, we argue that the principles of a right-action approach, within which nurses conform to a number of minimum principles, must be integrated into a virtue ethics approach that cultivates a caring attitude. Ethics education that incorporates both the ;critical companionship' method and the use of codes of ethics contributes positively to cultivating critical reflection by nurses.