In recent years, the human values at the heart of the nursing profession seem to have become side-lined by an increased focus on managerialist approaches to health care provision. Nursing's values are in danger of becoming marginalised further precisely because that which nursing does best - providing care and helping individuals through the human trauma of illness - is difficult to measure, and therefore plays little, if any, part in official accounts of outcome measures. Derek Sellman sets out the case for re-establishing the primacy of the virtues that underpin the practice of nursing in...