NMBA Code Of Ethics In Nursing And Midwifery Board Of Australia

Introduction

Across the world, nurses are held to a certain standard to provide patient-centered quality care. In Australia, all health practitioners are governed by the Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency. Registered Nurses are regulated by the Nursing and Midwifery Board of Australia (NMBA) which ensures all nurses are fully trained and qualified for their position. The patients and the general public hold health care practitioners, specifically nurses to a high standard of care. To ensure these professional expectations are met nurses must follow the NMBA Registered Nurse Standards for Practice, NMBA Code of Conduct and International Council of Nurses (ICN) Code of Ethics. These policies are to be adhered to, by all nurses

Code 2.1 focuses on the personal responsibility of nursing and works as a guideline for ethical practice. All nurses are accountable for their actions and have an obligation to abide by the code of ethics (Epstein & Turner, 2015). Continual Professional Development (CPD) is the continued lifelong learning that nurses undertake to keep up to date with current practice and knowledge. In Australia, nurses are required to complete 20 mandatory hours of CPD a year (Mlambo et al., 2021). This is important as there is new research conducted daily and new evidence to suggest practices should change. It is each nurse's responsibility to stay up to date with their CPD hours to solidify their skillset, refresh their knowledge and follow the current nursing

Principle four describes the different types of professional behaviour and upholding professional integrity. This is integrated into daily nursing practices and is essential for patient and nurse relationships (Collings-Hughes et al., 2021). In 2018, a survey was collected at the Sydney hospital to discover if the code of conduct was relevant to nurses and midwives in Australia. The results found that when participants considered the behaviour of nurses, the concept of "professional integrity" related to clinical nursing practice (Cowin et al.,