Everyday Ethical Challenges: A Necessary Shift in Undergraduate Nursing Ethics Education

Undergraduate nursing students often perceive ethics education as abstract and disconnected from everyday clinical practice. Traditional pedagogical approaches emphasize high-level ethical theory and exceptional cases, which may insufficiently prepare students for the routine ethical tensions nurses encounter in increasingly complex healthcare environments. This gap is concerning given nurses’ expanding roles in advocacy, addressing inequities, and contributing to system-level change. Although ethics education is widely recognized as foundational to nursing practice and essential for mitigating moral distress, there is limited evidence on effective strategies for integrating ethics education into undergraduate curricula in ways that foster ethical confidence, leadership, and ethical action.

The first goal of this study is to conduct a scoping review to identify educational strategies used in undergraduate nursing ethics education and to examine evidence of their effectiveness in supporting ethical decision-making and moral sensitivity. The second goal is to conduct an environmental scan of undergraduate nursing programs across Canada to describe current curricular approaches to ethics education, compare teaching methods and content, and identify opportunities for advancing nursing ethics pedagogy. Together, these findings aim to inform the development of more practice-relevant and transformative approaches to undergraduate nursing ethics education.