Bringing Human Rights into Nursing Education

Background: Health is a human right. Professional organizations such as the American Nurses Association and the American Public Health Association have written policy statements to affirm this strong held belief. A quality healthcare provider must hold this ethical principle in high regard. And yet, this is a hard concept to convey within a nursing curriculum.

Description: The Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 may be used as the foundation for integrating human right content into a nursing curriculum. It is important to note that the 1997 National Human Rights Survey (n=1004) found that only 8% of adults and 4% of youth in the United States know this document exists. A community health nursing course offers many opportunities to discuss the concept of health as a human right. Concepts such as health disparity, homelessness, poverty and advocacy all lend themselves well to the discussion of human rights and health.

Lessons Learned: The primary goal of this project is to facilitate the teaching of core nursing values. The five core values of professional nursing include human dignity, integrity, autonomy, altruism and social justice (Fahrenwald et al., 2005) Social justice is the core value anchored in the teaching of community health nursing; social justice and human rights go hand-in-hand.

The Association of Community Health Nursing Educators (ACHNE) also have a number of basic competencies and core knowledge (Carter et al, 2006) which align themselves well with the integration of human rights concepts.

Recommendations The implementation of this project may further a number of goals in nursing education:

1)To further the core value of social justice. 2)To answer the call to integrate human right education into professional curricula (Fitzpatrick, 2003) and contribute to the existing curricula database sponsored by the Harvard School of Public Health. 3)To provide more opportunities for ethical debate in the classroom setting. 4)To build empathy among nursing students. The concept of empathy is difficult to teach; however, human rights education lends itself well to this pursuit.