nurses who make up a particular group of post-18 students that the thesis is concerned.
As a sub-set of post-18 students, nursing students form part of a group studying in
preparation for professional work and it is for this reason that the moral education of
nurses is a matter of some import.
Professional work is identified in this thesis as work that aims to provide benefit to
others in terms of particular and specified human goods; what Sockett calls the
professional “ideal of service” (Sockett 1993 p. 16). Following Koehn (1994) this
category of professional workers includes what are thought of as the traditional
professions of medicine, law and the clergy but is extended to those other occupational
groups (variously described as semi-professions, vocational groups or similar) with a
strong public service ethos such as teaching, nursing, social work, youth work,
physiotherapy and so on. What these groups share is the aim of working for the benefit
of individual, as well as public good; and in many cases such workers profess to be
engaged in work that furthers the possibility for people to obtain goods which are taken-
for-granted as goods as such. But in the pursuit of these other-regarding goods
something more than ordinary everyday morality is required if Everyman is right in
expecting nurses, for example, to be more trustworthy than non-nurses. It follows that
those involved in the education of nurses must assume either that nursing students
already have a grasp of what counts as appropriate moral behaviour as a nurse or that
there is something for students to Ieam in this respect as they proceed through pre- and
post-registration nursing education. The former view presupposes that there is no need
for the moral education of nurses because earlier moral education for citizenship has not
only been successful but is also sufficient to meet the demands of professional nursing
work. The latter view assumes neither of these things and leads to recognition of the
necessity for some form of moral education within the framework of nursing education.
Pre-registration nursing students must normally be at least 183 but there is no maximum
age for entry onto a nursing programme. This, together with the requirement for
continuous professional development, means that nursing students may span the entire
age range of the working nursing population. As such to talk of the moral education of
nurses is to talk of the moral education of adults and not just of ‘late adolescents’.
3 Provision is made for individuals to begin a preparatory nursing programme at an age of no younger
than 17 years and 6 months but in practice students are rarely younger than 18.
24