Can nurse education foster professional authenticity? Four tensions within a regulated profession.

Abstract

Professional authenticity has recently been positioned as a form of resistance to restrictive understandings of professionalism (Melino et al., 2025). Yet treating it as a straightforward educational goal may obscure tensions between individual expression and professional accountability. This commentary positions professional authenticity as ethically accountable, context-responsive practice rather than a personality trait or unrestricted expression of a 'true self'. The paper also examines four tensions that complicate professional authenticity in nurse education: personal values versus professional obligations; openness and vulnerability versus boundaries and safety; consistency versus context-sensitive adaptation; and self-knowledge versus the socially constructed and partially unknowable self. Nurse educators can foster professional authenticity by employing ethically challenging cases that include situations in which responsibilities are genuinely complex, critical reflection, bounded self-disclosure, and psychologically and culturally safer dialogue. Professional authenticity is best understood as an ethically accountable way of practising that requires ongoing judgement, examination and justification.