Ethical conduct in nurse education: Creating safe staff–student boundaries

SummaryThis article synthesises principles and ideas from relevant literature on professional boundaries and applies them to higher education settings with the intention of contributing to contemporary debates on appropriate, respectful, and ethical conduct in academia. This is against a background of structural changes and growing complexity of academic institutions in concert with decreasing adherence to rules of conduct and established privileges historically handed down from traditional universities. The professional and personal conduct of nurse academics is increasingly unfettered in association with ‘market’ forces and simultaneously more available for scrutiny in association with a greater awareness of and institutionalisation of human rights and protections across all sectors of society.