Biomedical subjects

Derek Sellman

Publications and source records attributed to Derek Sellman.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed2006

On being of good character: nurse education and the assessment of good character.

The Nursing and Midwifery Council sets good character as a condition not only of entry to the UK register of nurses but also for entry to and continuation on pre-registration nursing programmes in the UK. This requires education providers to assess the character of potential and actual nursing students yet the guidance offered by the NMC for making such assessments is insufficiently developed and serves to provide criteria by which determination can be made of good character only in a narrow sense. Assessment of character requires making value judgements about others and lends support to the idea that nurse education has an explicit moral component. This paper outlines some of the difficulties in assessing character, explores the idea that good character can be assessed in both a thin and a thick sense, and considers some of the consequent implications for nurse educationalists.

Character↗

PubMed2006

The importance of being trustworthy.

The idea that nurses should be trustworthy seems to be accepted as generally unproblematic. However, being trustworthy as a nurse is complicated because of the diverse range of expectations from patients, relatives, colleagues, managers, peers, professional bodies and the institutions within which nursing takes place. Nurses are often faced with competing demands and an action perceived by some as trustworthy can be seen by others as untrustworthy. In this article some of the reasons for the importance of being trustworthy are offered together with a preliminary discussion about how being a trustworthy nurse is far from straightforward.

Attitude of Health Personnel↗

PubMed2005

Towards an understanding of nursing as a response to human vulnerability.

It is not unusual for the adjective 'vulnerable' to be applied to those in receipt of nursing practice without making clear what it is that persons thus described are actually vulnerable to. In this paper I argue that the way nursing has adopted the idea of vulnerability tends to imply that some people are in some way invulnerable. This is conceptually unsustainable and renders the idea of the vulnerable patient (almost) meaningless. The paper explores the meaning of vulnerability both in general terms and in the context of nursing practice. It is argued that to be in receipt of nursing is to become, to a greater or lesser extent, more-than-ordinary vulnerable. Thus all patients are more-than-ordinarily vulnerable and this restricts their potential to flourish. Nurses are well placed to contribute to the flourishing of more-than-ordinarily vulnerable persons and my substantive claim is that this 'protective' function is indeed a legitimate and fundamental part of the role of nurses.

Empathy↗

PubMed2003

Open-mindedness: a virtue for professional practice.

This paper introduces the notion of open-mindedness before proceeding to outline its value to the practical activity of nursing. An argument is constructed to point to the desirability of the development of a virtue of open-mindedness in nurses in order to complement evidence-based practice. Attention is drawn to two failures of open-mindedness (the vices of closed-mindedness and credulousness), which have the potential both to restrict autonomous practice and to cause harm.

Attitude of Health Personnel↗