Respect for human dignity, protecting patients’ health, advocating for patients' rights—these are just a few of the provisions in the nurse code of ethics. How does that code play out in the real world? What happens when a nurse’s ethics are challenged, and what structures are in place to help nurses care for patients in the ways they know they are supposed to?
Those questions were taken up at a three-day Nursing Ethics Summit last August at the Johns Hopkins School of Nursing.
Joining Sheilah Kast in the studio to talk about some of these issues is Dr. Cynda Hylton Rushton, the Anne and George L. Bunting Professor of Clinical Ethics at the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics and Johns Hopkins School of Nursing. She is the organizer of the ethics summit. And on the line from her home in West Virginia is LaurieBadzek, a nurse attorney and a professor of nursing at West Virginia University.
In November, Johns Hopkins released a report that explores the ethical issues nurses face, "A Blueprint for 21st Century Nursing Ethics: Report of the National Nursing Summit".
