Storing Moral Identity as a Core of the Professional Identity for Future Nurses

Abstract

Evolving in time, the nursing profession construction started based on moral values, which were underlined by Florence Nightingale (1989) and it was associated with compassion and care, but with the technical development and increasing the complexity of care provided, nursing went from a job to a profession, which asks more and more technical competency and more and more pragmatism (Serra, 2008), losing in time the humanity part of the care, overwhelmed by the detachment discourse which became dominant in the times of an evidence based medicine (Charon, 2016; DasGupta, 2014). Going back to humanity became one of the main concerns of the researchers in the last decade and that put the focus on developing the interactional capacity of the students in nursing (Benner et al., 2009; Charon, 2016; Fagermoen; 1997; Gold, 2020; Sharpless et. al., 2015), one of the most important skill to develop being attentive listening (Charon, 2016) in the relation to the patient and the colleagues, attitudes promoted with the Narrative Medicine Program (NMP) conceived by Charon (2016), who is a doctor and professor at Medicine Faculty in Columbia University in United States. Conclusion: The data resulted from this study suggests the need to direct the curriculum on the professional identity of the future nurses’ development, which is in the same line with other studies, but also the need to help the students in the management of the experiences from their clinical practice considered significant to them, which could sustain the development of a professional identity guided by care and focused on the relationship with the patient.