Ethics education is an essential component of nursing education, yet ethical competence cannot be assumed to be fully developed at the point of graduation. This commentary builds upon Papastavrou et al. (2026) by examining the need for continuing ethical reflection after formal nursing education has ended. A distinction is made between ethical knowledge acquired through education and the ability to recognise, analyse, and respond to ethically challenging situations in clinical practice. Existing literature suggests that healthcare professionals encounter ethical challenges in everyday practice and that structured ethics reflection can support ethical awareness, professional development, and ethical decision making. The commentary argues that ethical competence should be understood as a dynamic capacity that requires continued development throughout professional practice, particularly when nurses encounter changing clinical contexts and competing ethical responsibilities. Structured approaches, including ethics rounds, may provide opportunities to practise ethical reasoning and to examine ethical problems beyond informal collegial consensus. Their interprofessional character may further facilitate the consideration of different professional perspectives and responsibilities. However, stronger empirical evidence is needed to establish the effectiveness of such approaches. Healthcare organisations should therefore consider whether they have a responsibility to provide the time, structures, and supportive environments necessary for nurses to develop and maintain ethical competence throughout their professional careers.
An important question that vocational educators face is, namely, ‘How do we make people want to do good in professional life?’. This paper explores the concept of professionalism as an approach to ethics education – both in vocational degree programs and also in professional associations and colleges. I argue that current approaches to professionalism focused on guidelines or standards for good professional practice fall short of fostering intrinsic motivation among professionals to pursue the good in their work. I discuss how a framework of professionalism grounded in a robust sense of professional identity and virtue can fill the motivational gap that currently exists in some professionalism frameworks. I then explore how professionalism curriculums might go about fostering professional identity and virtue among students and junior professionals. The paper closes with a discussion of the advantages of integrating a robust professional identity and virtue framework into ethics education.
Ethics education is a substantial function of ethics consultation. However, the current focus is largely on education for healthcare professionals rather than for patients and their families. Informed consent, as the basic application of the principle of respect for autonomy/persons, requires patients to have a complete understanding of their medical conditions, treatment options, and available alternatives. Nevertheless, without meeting the ethical aspects of the therapeutic relationship, providing patients with relevant medical information cannot make consent informed. Besides the pertinent medical information, patients should know how to incorporate ethical standards into their care, how to reflect their values and preferences in their medical decisions, and how to make autonomous choices. In this view, patients’ literacy in ethics should be considered an essential component of informed consent. Therefore, this paper sheds light on ethics education for patients and recommends healthcare institutions provide patients with education on key ethical subjects through ethics consultation services. Although current challenges of ethics consultation cause a major limitation to achieve this, the significant increase in the number of ethicists/bioethicists can allow healthcare organizations to improve their capacity, capability, and quality by employing more well-educated ethics consultants. For this reason, the availability of leadership and financial support may alleviate the problems and give an opportunity to ethics consultation services to extend ethics education to patients and their families. Not only can ethics education for patients ensure that consent is informed, but it can also notably benefit patients, healthcare professionals, and healthcare organizations.
