Introduction:

Nursing is the science and art of caring for human beings. The ethical and humanizing dimension of nursing and health care is becoming more important every day.

Objective:

To systematize the ethical dimension of nursing care.

Methods:

A systematic bibliographic review was carried out to develop a reflexive-critical analysis of the content of documents, where books, original articles and review articles were considered. The search strategy adopted was the use of keywords or descriptors, connected through Boolean operators OR and AND. The key words used were enfermería [nursing], cuidado [care] and ética [ethics], being these identified through DECs or MeSH. Thus, descriptive articles in Spanish and English were used for the search. The search was carried out in the databases Medline/Pubmed, LILACS, and SciELO, in December 2017.

Conclusions:

Nursing has an important ethical load; caring for the sick is its cornerstone reason and closely linked to ethical principles whose absence would devalue? the essence of such a humane profession. There are no scenarios where nursing services are provided without the ethical principles of goodness, autonomy, justice, responsibility, at the service of the best care provided to the patient.

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