Ethics & Ethical Standards for Nurses & Midwives

A 2.5-hour course on ethical reasoning for NMC-registered nurses and midwives, built around The Code (NMC, 2018), Montgomery v Lanarkshire (2015), and the Mental Capacity Act 2005. It moves from the four ethical principles and advocacy's distinct role in nursing, through consent and capacity, confidentiality and candour, probity and the ethical duty to speak up, to a structured method for genuine dilemmas applied to end-of-life nursing care.

Nursing and midwifery ethics gets taught, too often, as medical ethics with the terminology swapped. That leaves out the ethical territory nurses and midwives actually work in: sustained presence with a patient over a shift or a pregnancy rather than a single consultation, and a structurally central advocacy role. This course names that territory directly rather than borrowing someone else's.

You'll finish able to apply the four ethical principles to real nursing and midwifery situations, assess whether consent is genuinely valid and work through a capacity assessment properly, recognise the limits of confidentiality and meet the professional duty of candour, reason through a probity concern, and work through a genuine ethical dilemma using a structured method, applied to a real end-of-life nursing case.

The course runs across five modules of unequal length:

• The four ethical principles, advocacy, and what The Code actually asks of you
• Consent, capacity, and autonomy in nursing and midwifery care
• Confidentiality, the professional duty of candour, and records as an ethical discipline
• Honesty, probity, conflicts of interest, and the ethical duty to speak up
• A structured method for dilemmas, end-of-life nursing care, and what's genuinely distinct about nursing ethics

Any nurse or midwife registered with the NMC, at any career stage, in any setting, ward-based, community, mental health, learning disability, or midwifery. Part of the wider CrownEthics library of CPD courses for UK healthcare professionals.

This course stands on its own. These pair naturally if your situation calls for it:

• You want to understand the wider fitness to practise process — add Fitness to Practise: What You Need to Know. Relevant across every UK regulator, not GMC-specific.
• You need to show genuine change has taken place — add Remediation — Demonstrating Change. Takes the reasoning this course teaches and turns it into an evidenced remediation package.

Every course above is standalone and priced individually.