Core Professional and Personal Values of Nurses about Nursing in Erbil City Hospitals: A Profession, Not Just Career

Background and objective: Nursing is a caring profession. Caring encompasses empathy for and connection with people. Teaching and role-modeling caring is a nursing curriculum challenge. Caring is best demonstrated by a nurse's ability to embody the five essential to education core values of professional nursing include human dignity, integrity, autonomy, altruism, and social justice. The caring professional nurse integrates these values in clinical practice. Strategies for integrating and teaching core values are outlined and outcomes of value-based nursing education which described to ensure that the legacy of caring behavior by nurses is strengthened for the future nursing workforce. Methods: This study aimed to evaluate nurse's values regarding nursing discipline. A cross-sectional study design from 27th of December 2016 to 22nd of January 2017 in Emergency Management Center for Cardiac Surgery and Rizgary Teaching Hospital in Erbil City of Kurdistan Region of Iraq. It consisted of 54 nurses who graduated from the College of Nursing. A non-probability, purposive sample selection was used. Data were collected through the using of a questionnaire by self-report method which consisted of two main parts. First is a sociodemographic characteristic of the nurses and second consisted of 21 items regarding values of nurses about nursing discipline. The data was analyzed through software of SPSS for Windows V.23. It includes descriptive statistical analysis and inferential statistical analysis. Results: With regards to the age, the highest percentage of the sample (57.4%) was between 31-36 years old, 61.1% were female, and single (66.7%), with 70.4%had less than 5 years of experience. The items of values of nurses about nursing consisted of 21 items distributed on 9 value domains. Regarding the Human dignity, Social justice, Autonomy, Precision and accuracy in caring, Responsibility, Human relationship, Individual and professional competency, Sympathy, and Trust making domains the means were 80.6%, 87.6%, 96.3%, 98.1%, 87%, 84%, 85.2%, 88%, and 84.3% respectively. Conclusions: The overall value of nurses regarding the nursing profession is 88% that is a great result which shows us that most of the nurses have adequate value about their profession.