Introduction
It is important to define and promote professionalism because nurses’ conduct is at
the heart of maintaining safe patient care and public trust in the profession. Professionalism and being professional are terms used frequently and interchangeably in the nursing literature and policy
documents to describe qualities and conduct expected of nurses. However, there is
not a shared understanding of the attributes of nursing professionalism.
Objectives
This article explores three primary questions: (a) How is professionalism defined?
(b) What are the attributes of professionalism as described in the literature? (c)
What attributes of professionalism related to nursing are captured within the regulatory
(licensure) framework of Australia?
Methods
A scoping review structured this study with articles about professionalism (a key
search term) identified through PubMed, CINAHL, and Embase searches. Included articles
were published in English between 1960 to 2019. Excluded articles provided no definition
or discussion on the attributes of professionalism. Articles were coded using descriptive
qualitative data analysis techniques. Attributes were then mapped against the Australian
nursing and midwifery Professional Practice Framework, which included codes of conduct
and standards of practice.
Results
Three overarching themes emerged from the data synthesis, each with a number of constituent
attributes: (a) inner processes, (b) outer processes, and (c) contextual processes.
The themed constituent attributes of professionalism could be found within nursing
regulators’ Professional Practice Framework documents. A 21st-century conceptual model
of professionalism and its links to the regulatory context is proposed based on the
data synthesis findings.
Conclusion
The proposed contemporary model of professionalism provides a broader contextual perspective
of the attributes of professionalism compared to past models. It offers a potential
model for other countries to draw from as they strengthen professional regulatory
infrastructure in nursing and midwifery.
Keywords
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Biography
Lynette Cusack, PhD, RN, is an Associate Professor, Faculty of Health and Medical Sciences, Adelaide Nursing School, The University of Adelaide, Adelaide, South Australia, and a Nursing and Midwifery Research Consultant, Northern Adelaide Local Health Network.
Biography
Phoebe G. Drioli-Phillips, BPsych(Hons), is Research Assistant, Faculty of Health and Medical Sciences, Adelaide Nursing School, The University of Adelaide.
Biography
Janie A. Brown, PhD, RN, is Course Coordinator—Master of Nursing Practice, School of Nursing, Midwifery and Paramedicine, Curtin University, Western Australia.
Biography
Sarah Hunter, PhD, BPsych(Hons), is a Knowledge Translation Postdoctoral Research Fellow, College of Nursing and Health Sciences, Flinders University, South Australia.
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© 2019 National Council of State Boards of Nursing. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
