Professional Values of Nurses and Nursing Students: a comparative study

BACKGROUND: The process of learning the professional values is started from the student's entering to the university and to the workplace. This study compared the importance of professional values from the perspectives of nurses and nursing students. METHODS: This descriptive-analytical study was conducted on 250 nurses and 100 nursing students. Data were collected using the Nursing Professional Values Scale-Revised. RESULTS: According to the findings, the mean scores of nurses (3.68 ± 0.16) and nursing students' (3.86 ± 0.17) perspective toward professional values were at an important level. Furthermore, the students' perspective toward the professional values' importance was significantly more favorable than those of nurses. The highest mean scores of professional values in the two groups were related to the caring and justice domains. Both groups considered activism and professionalism as the least important domains among the others. CONCLUSIONS: As the findings suggest, we need to pay more attention to values training, especially professionalism and activism, during undergraduate education for preparing the nurses to work in today's complex healthcare context. It is necessary to conduct more comprehensive studies for exploring the gap between theory and practice in different cultures and contexts.