Academic and Professional Integrity in Nursing: Key Considerations

This essay delves into the critical aspects of academic and professional integrity within the nursing profession. It begins by defining academic integrity as responsible and honest scholarship, emphasizing its foundational values of fairness, trust, honesty, responsibility, and respect. The essay highlights the interrelation between academic integrity and professional ethics, underscoring how a nurse's academic conduct directly impacts their fitness for practice and the quality of patient care. It explores the connection between academic integrity and writing, emphasizing the importance of original work, proper citation, and the avoidance of plagiarism. The influence of external pressures on academic integrity is also discussed. The essay further examines the role of scholarly ethics in professional practice, stressing its importance in addressing ethical dilemmas and ensuring quality patient care. It highlights the significance of tools like Grammarly, SafeAssign, and paraphrasing in promoting academic honesty. The essay concludes by advocating for comprehensive academic integrity policies and ethical practices in nursing education to ensure that nurses are well-prepared to deliver ethical and high-quality patient care.

Running Head: Academic and Professional Integrity
Assignment
Part 3, Section 1
Topic: Academic and Professional Integrity
Name
Institutional Affiliation

Academic and Professional Integrity 2
Academic Integrity refers to responsible and honest scholarship (Michigan State
University, 2019). It involves five basic values: Fairness, Trust, Honesty, Responsibility and
Respect in all the academic activities. The professional Integrity refers to the conduct or behavior
consistent with ethical and professional expectations of nursing role. Both these aspects are
interrelated. The professional expertise of nurses in their role depends largely on their academic
integrity at respective educational courses. Their academic integrity at nursing schools defines
whether they are fit for practice, fit for purpose and fit for academic award.
Academic Integrity is necessary in nursing profession for many reasons. It shows that the
others may trust you to act in a honest way. Academic integrity during the course work gives
value to the degree achieved. Also, Acting with academic integrity gives peace of mind to the
scholars, reduces unnecessary stress and makes them more productive.
This article describes the connection between academic integrity and writing in nursing.
Secondly, the article explains the relationship between professional practices and
scholarly ethics. Thirdly, it also explains how SafeAssign, Grammerly and
paraphrasing contribute to academic integrity.
Academic Integrity and Writing
The nursing students are supposed to submit their original work in their projects and
provide credit to the ideas of other people by citing resources. Academic Integrity in written
work involves expressing one’s original ideas, independently completing the assigned projects,
accurate reporting of findings, citing used resources and maintaining honest conduct during
examinations. The acts like plagiarism, cheating in coursework and exams, forging a tutor’s

Academic and Professional Integrity 3
signature over the assessments and showing the other people’s work as your own are considered
as violation of the academic integrity (Glasper, 2016).
The factors influencing academic integrity include the pressure to achieve good marks
(84%), fear of losing the status among friends (71%), limited availability of time to study (74%)
and the incidents of successful cheating (71%) (Allen,Stanley, Cascoe & Stennett, 2017). The
engagement of nursing students in academic dishonesty has several implications for the nursing
profession as it depends largely on the moral integrity of nursing professionals. The after effect
of these malpractices violates the trust in this profession to care for the patients in an honest
manner and to value the life of humans. The nursing students who are academically dishonest are
mostly identified performing dishonest acts in their professional practice too. Such acts may
result into harmful patient outcomes (Allen et al., 2017).
Professional Practices and Scholarly Ethics
Ethical conduct is necessary in professional practice of nurses. It forms a basis for
identifying practically what motives, intentions and actions are valued in nursing profession. The
education about scholarly ethics in nursing courses provides a foundation for ability to address
ethical questions emerging in the patient-nurse relationships during professional practice. The
professional practice involves concerns like protecting the rights of patients, informed consent,
truth telling and informed decision making. Lack of scholarly ethics and related preparedness at
the graduate and undergraduate courses impede the ability of nurses to work in collaboration
with their teams at jobs. They are unable to take decisions when ethical problems confront them
in real time situations.

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The Nurses in their professional role, deal with complexities of decisions related to life
and death, conflicts related to treatment goals, misunderstandings related to informed consent,
lack of policies and supportive resources, power differentials and many more complex situations.
Ethical issues also emerge during daily nursing practice. Effective academic integrity at the
student level inherently develops ethical professional behavior in nurses. It is primarily important
in nursing profession as the patient’s welfare and care depends on nurses. Hence, scholarly ethics
is necessary to prepare them for delivering quality patient care while steering through the
complex relationship with other clinicians, patients, families and physicians (Hoskins, Grady &
Ulrich, 2018).
The academic integrity and the ethical practice based on honesty should be the
foundation of nursing educational programs. Honesty is the basic ethical factor. It is identified
that a large number of students in nursing take part in academic dishonesty. There is a high risk
of potential threat when such unethical conduct is transferred to the professional practice. It often
gets translated into adverse patient outcomes. Hence, the system needs to declare zero tolerance
for such unethical behaviors at the scholarly level.
Grammarly, SafeAssign, and Paraphrasing
Grammarly provides a plagiarism checker which scans the
plagiarized content in the written work and also examines other issues like
grammatical mistakes, spellings, punctuations etc. This tool helps the
scholars in identifying whether their writings are copied or paraphrased.

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These suggestions are helpful in detecting plagiarism in text. The grammarly
also assists in adding and citing the sources.
The SafeAssign compares the written text with a big database of
academic papers to detect the cheating. It is a tool for plagiarism prevention.
Effectively citing the resources and paraphrasing helps in
prevention of plagiarism. The paraphrasing helps in ethical sharing and
integration of ideas from different other resources into the writing work. It
helps in strengthening the written work through incorporation of evidences.
Citing the resources adds credibility to the projects as it supports the texts
through evidences from other author’s work. There are different citation and
referencing styles which are used to cite the work of other authors in ones
project.
The paraphrasing maintains the academic integrity by simply disclosing the
sources of evidences and texts which are taken from other’s work and are
used in their work.
These tools make effective use of technology to detect
plagiarism or cheating. These websites and the reports of plagiarism
produced by these tools may be used to pay due attention to the writing
styles of students. Additionally, it is required that the nurse educators should
foster and communicate fair ethical practices among the student nurses. The
instances of academic dishonesty may be reduced if the students get
identified performing these acts.

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It is recommended that the educational institutions and healthcare
providing bodies should implement comprehensive academic integrity
policies to address cheating in examinations and tests.
References
Allen,C., Stanley, S., Cascoe,K. & Stennett,R. (2017). Academic Dishonesty among
Undergraduate Nursing Students. International Archives of Nursing and
Healthcare. 3(3). 1-3. Doi: 10.23937/2469-5823/1510074
Glasper,A. (2016). Does cheating by students undermine the integrity of the nursing profession?
British Journal of Nursing, 25(16). 932-934.
Hoskins, K., Grady, C., Ulrich, C.M., (January 31, 2018) "Ethics Education in Nursing:
Instruction for Future Generations of Nurses" OJIN: The Online Journal of Issues
in Nursing. 23(1),Manuscript 3. DOI: 10.3912/OJIN.Vol23No01Man03
Michigan State University (2019). What is Academic Integrity? Retrieved from
https://ombud.msu.edu/academic-integrity/What%20is%20Academic
%20Integrity.html