competence (in the narrow sense) in professional education for it might be thought that
anyone who wants to become a nurse would recognise immediately the necessity for
safe and competent practice. Yet the idea of competence in task in nursing is moot. The
problem is related to a general perception that nursing is a simple occupation that
anyone can do. Anecdotal evidence suggests that there is a widely held belief among
nurses, students of nursing, health care assistants (and, unsurprisingly perhaps, many
students are drawn from the ranks of health care assistants) and others that while
nursing is hard physical work there is little else involved; a general belief that theory is
largely irrelevant for practice; and a general view that even the ‘simple’ physical tasks
of nursing require little education or training. There seems to be an almost
institutionalised anti-intellectualism amongst practitioners expressed in these views and
evidenced (perhaps) by the repeatedly recorded barriers to implementing changes in
practice even where such changes have overwhelming support from research evidence
(see, for example, Hek et al 2002) and the resistance to manual handling as discussed in
Chapter 5 provides one telling example.
This emphasis on the teaching and measurement of task competence is, of course, an
essential aspect of an education that aims to prepare students to become safe
practitioners and it reflects the current prominence of the evidence-based practice
movement. But if we mistake this approach for a full account of nursing education then
we neglect the crucial human experience of health and illness. If the purpose of nursing
is, as I have claimed, to enable the flourishing of more-than-ordinarily vulnerable
persons then a concentration on task competence understates the importance of human
frailty. If I am right about this then the practice of nurse education must seek to
encompass the cultivation of the virtues of nursing.
I have already suggested that in teaching for virtue nurse teachers can illustrate virtue in
action in their own everyday practice and this can alert students to possibilities about
the rewarding nature of the internal goods of a practice. Thus far the discussion has
remained at an abstract level. In the final section of this chapter I shall offer a brief
discussion about some of the particulars of this aretiac virtue ethics approach to the
moral education of nurses.
178