Hidden curriculum and the formation of safe, compassionate nurses: a Christian perspective on education and workforce practice

Abstract

The hidden curriculum in nursing education refers to the implicit lessons transmitted through routines, relationships, and unit culture that shape how learners interpret what is truly valued in practice. Although it can strengthen professional identity and adaptive competence, it can also normalize unsafe shortcuts, silence, emotional detachment, and risk tolerance that undermine both safety-critical behaviors and compassionate care. This commentary reframes the hidden curriculum as a modifiable driver of patient safety and moral formation within clinical learning environments, using a human factors and systems lens to connect everyday signals to observable outcomes such as hand hygiene adherence, medication verification, handoff reliability, near-miss reporting, willingness to speak up, and respectful patient-centered interactions. A practical reform package is proposed that aligns educator role modeling, structured debriefing, psychologically safe team routines, and unit-level measurement with feasible evaluation within one academic year. Treating the hidden curriculum as part of work system design, rather than an unavoidable cultural residue, creates an actionable pathway for nursing programs and partner hospitals to improve safety while strengthening professional formation and mobility-ready practice norms. This commentary also situates the hidden curriculum within a Christian ethical framework, emphasizing compassion, dignity, truthfulness, humility, and service as core values that shape both patient safety and the formation of nurses as morally grounded professionals.