A conference of the International Centre for Nursing Ethics at Surrey Univerity was held at Yale on 17th/18th July . I gave two papers. In A fundamental ethical responsibility of leaders and professional bodies I suggested that authorities in nursing should set out what they see as the fundamental values in nursing since, given the global nature of nursing and the cultural complexity in which much nursing is carried out, nurses are sometimes confused as to the basic ethical stance of the profession. In Thus far and no further I discussed the extent to which nursing can accommodate in its practice the demands of different cultural perspective. Both papers started animated and questioning discussion – as a result of which I shal be modifying the papers before submitting them for publication.
The conference was sponsored by Yale University’s Interdisciplinary Centre for Bioethics and the Yale Center for International Nursing Scholarship and Education.