What Makes a Good NurseWhy the Virtues are Important
for Nurses
Derek Sellman
Foreword by Alan Cribb
'Derek Sellman's text is both a timely and highly absorbing journey deep into the heart of nursing. It reveals a timeless and essential set of key virtues that should be a major part of the moral compass of every nurse. Subsequently, it should be read by all nurses - and most certainly by all nurse educators - who are interested in maintaining and promoting the vital moral characteristics of nursing now and in the future.'
- Dr. Martin Woods, Senior Lecturer, School of Health and Social Services, Massey University, New Zealand

In recent years, the human values at the heart of the nursing profession seem to have become sidelined by an increased focus on managerialist approaches to health care provision. Nursing's values are in danger of becoming marginalised further precisely because that which nursing does best – providing care and helping individuals through the human trauma of illness – is difficult to measure, and therefore plays little, if any, part in official accounts of outcome measures.

Derek Sellman sets out the case for re-establishing the primacy of the virtues that underpin the practice of nursing in order to address the question: what makes a good nurse? He provides those in the caring professions with both a rationale and a practical understanding of the importance that particular character traits, including justice, courage, honesty, trustworthiness and open-mindedness, play in the practice of nursing, and explains why and how nurses should strive to cultivate these virtues, as well as the implications of this for practice.
This original and thought-provoking book will be essential reading for nurses and nursing students, care workers, care commissioners, and many others who work in the caring professions.
April 2011, ISBN: 978-1-84310-932-7, 224 pages, paperback,
£19.99 / US$34.95

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