Exploring Nursing Students’Awareness and Compliance with Ethical Standards of Privacy and Confidentiality: The Moderating Role of Technology

Awareness and compliance with ethical standards are essential in fostering trust, accountability, and professionalism within nursing practice. Protecting patient information is a legal obligation and an ethical cornerstone of clinical care. The study aimed to determine the extent of nursing students’ awareness and compliance with ethical standards of privacy and confidentiality and to explore how technology moderates this relationship. Anchored in Bandura’s Social Cognitive Theory, Peplau’s Theory of Interpersonal Relations, and Kohlberg’s Theory of Moral Development, the study explored how nursing students develop ethical awareness and maintain adherence to privacy and confidentiality norms. The descriptive-quantitative design was employed to evaluate and compare students' understanding and adherence to ethical principles while assessing technology's influence on their ethical behavior. Data analysis was conducted using Partial Least Squares & Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM) to evaluate the hypothesized relationships. The findings revealed that most nursing students demonstrated a high level of ethical awareness and compliance, with technology exerting a significant moderating effect that enhanced ethical awareness and behavior. The integration of digital tools such as electronic health records and clinical decision-support systems strengthened students’ commitment to maintaining patient privacy and confidentiality. A framework was developed to illustrate the moderating effects of technology-based training and simulation in nursing education to reinforce ethical competency and strengthens ethical compliance in healthcare settings.