What insights does Florence Nightingale bring to todays ethical dilemmas?
Florence Nightingale is indeed a role model for us when we are faced with ethical dilemmas. She saw ethical knowing as valuing and clarifying situations to create formal behaviors, expressions and dimensions of both morality and ethics intersecting with duties; today these would be considered legally prescribed duties. Ethical knowing included daily decisions of right and wrong; what should be done in practice, in personal conduct and behaviors; priorities; responsibilities; and advocacy for the patient, nurse, hospital, clinic, environment and society. Nightingale identified ethical conflicts in which hospital systems did not allow nurses to do what they believed was right, particularly in identifying unsafe practices or acting as patient advocates. She taught that the moral ideal of the nurse was realized when the whole self of the nurse was brought into relationship with the whole of the person receiving care. It was the nurse who must protect the vulnerable patient and who must pre
