A Blueprint for 21st Century Nursing Ethics:

Report of the National Nursing Summit

Executive Summary

In August 2014, 50 nursing leaders came together in Baltimore for a summit meeting on Nursing
Ethics for the 21st Century, sponsored by the Johns Hopkins School of Nursing and Johns
Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics. These leaders had set for themselves an ambitious
agenda that could culminate in changing the nations health care culture to more strongly support
basic ethical values and principles and more effectively enables nurses ethical practice.
For many reasons, the environments in which nurses work are changing rapidly, yet one core
principle holds constant: nurses desire to serve their patients, their patients families, and their
communities while fulfilling nursing precepts. Substantial changes in the U.S. health care system
now under way also create new opportunities for organizational arrangements and work designs
that enhance the practice of nursing and create for the next generation the chance to fulfill their
desire to have meaningful careers in service to others.
Summit participants concentrated on ways that nursing and ethics intersect in four critical
domains: clinical practice, education, research, and public policy. They identified priorities in
each of these domains and created a blueprint for the future leading to the following vision
statement:
Ethics is a critical part of everyday nursing practice. Nurses in all roles and settings must
have the knowledge, skills and tools to uphold their professional values. We pledge to work
together to support and safeguard the professional values of nurses and all health care
professionals and to strengthen a culture where they are able to practice ethically.
(Detailed information about the priorities, the blueprint, the projects growing list of
collaborating partners, and additional resources, as well as an invitation to comment on and join
in this vital work can be found on the projects website,
http://www.bioethicsinstitute.org/nursing-ethics-summit-report.)
Further, participants made commitments to carry on this workcommitments to themselves, to
each other, and to the profession they revere.

Eight Key Assumptions

Underlying summit planning were eight key assumptions:
1. In all settings in which nurses work, ethical challenges are embedded in everyday
practice
2. The need to strengthen the ethical foundation of nursing is urgent, particularly in light of
pressures that threaten the integrity of individual nurses, the profession, and the people
they serve
3. The ANA Code of Ethics is foundational to understanding the ethical landscape for
nurses, and serves as an invaluable resource and guide for how nurses carryout their
professional ethical obligations
4. Many ethical pressures arise more from disparities in the human resources, social capital,
and financial resources available across the system, many of which result from resource
allocation decisions and waste, rather than from resource scarcity, and contribute to
persistent problems in access to care
5. Moral distress is a pervasive reality for nurses when they are unable to translate their
moral choices into action because barriers prevent them from practicing in accord with
their values
6. Nurses must define the boundaries of their professional responsibility with interprofessional colleagues in the environments where they practice
7. Nurses are ideally situated to lead and contribute to contemporary models of care
delivery, policy, research, and education
8. Efforts to improve the ethical environment for nurses have direct impact on the quality of
care provided to patients and families and the sustainability of the health care system
Achieving the Triple Aim in health careimproving the experience of care, reducing per capita
health care costs, and improving population healthdepends heavily on the day-to-day actions
of nurses. These actions take place in a multi-layered social-ecological context.
Social-Ecological Context
Many layers of relationships and interactions make up nurses working environments, whether
they work in hospitals, nursing homes, physician offices, home health agencies, schools, prisons,
or public health programs. The social-ecological context of these work environments is shaped
by individual characteristics of nurses, patients, and patients families, and the relationships
among them, as well as relationships between the nurse and full array of other health care
professionals. The context also is established by characteristics of the employer organization
(including its invisible architecture) and the community it serves, and, more broadly, by
professional and educational regulations and standards and by the broad social, political, and
economic forces.
Nurses working in supportive contexts are more able to practice according to their ethical values
and to emphasize other important work attributes, including good communication and teamwork.
When asked to describe the essential qualities of nurses who are practicing ethically, summit
participants produced a lengthy list, headed by compassion, competence, courage, respect,
openness, and reflection.

Blueprint Summary
To move nursing ethics issues forward, Summit participants developed bold ideas for making
progress in how nurses are prepared through education, how they are supported in clinical
practice and by policy, and what we know about their work through research. Although each of
these four domains was discussed by separate work groups, a number of themes cut across their
deliberations:
The need for a more intentional and proactive approach to ethical practice.
Ethical practice is a key feature of accountability and personal responsibility.
The significance of moral distress in the daily lives of nurses.
The interplay among nurses competence in ethics, the environments where they practice,
and the culture that either supports or constrains integrity and ethical behavior.
The need for interdisciplinary and cross-organizational efforts and partners and strong
dissemination plans.
The importance of building on existing work, activities, and commitments.
The value of a diverse set of funders for this work, including pooling funds from multiple
sources.
While changing the culture of health care is a long-term project, changing the work
environments for individual nurses can start now.
Each of the domain groups created their own terminology and action plans that contain common
themes and interrelated action steps.
Clinical Practice: Develop and sustain work environments that support ethical nursing
practice
The above bold idea related to clinical practice is embedded in nursings foundational
commitments, articulated by the Summit participants, of: integrity and respect; commitment to
the health and well-being of patients, families, and the public; and moral agency.
System shifts needed to attain more ethical work environments for nurses would change the
approach to ethics by organizations and their leaders, by individual nurses, and in nursing
education, and would involve patients and families in real partnerships.
Illustrative action plan steps include defining and describing ways in which workplaces currently
fall short of creating ethical environments for nurses and how they could improve; and bringing
these issues to the attention of broader audiences.
Nursing Education: Promote excellence in nursing ethics education, in order to build a
strong and diverse health care workforce to advance the ethical delivery of health care
The nursing education bold idea is embedded in foundational commitments to clinical
competence and the need for educational preparation to meet ethical challenge that builds on
students underlying values, continues throughout their careers, and is grounded by ANA and
NSNA codes of ethics, among others. To achieve stronger ethical components of educational
programs, shifts are needed in their current scope, priority, design, and evaluation.

Examples of the action plan steps in this domain are: to compile information about the current
status of ethics teaching at all levels of nursing education and to strengthen expectations for
students ethical behavior within educational settings.
Nursing Research: Develop a research agenda that will lead to a culture of ethical practice
in diverse settings that is evidence-based and measurable in terms of outcomes and
pragmatic considerations
This bold idea is embedded in foundational commitments related to achieving clarity and focus
for the research agenda, identifying the need for champions and a powerful coalition to identify
and follow through on top research questions, and the quality of research ideas. To achieve the
bold idea will require shifts in the scale and scope of nursing ethics research and the creation of
new research opportunities.
Action plan steps can be illustrated by the following suggested activities: surveying ANA
membership and medical center leaders on important areas for research and developing tools and
metrics that enable ethics research projects to identify key patient, nursing, and organizational
outcomes.
Nursing Policy: Create an ethical health environment through the development of
resources, policies, metrics (outcomes), education, training, and research
For nursing policy, the bold idea is embedded in these foundational commitments: the prime
importance of promoting care excellence and the need for civility in the work environment,
protection of professional integrity, reciprocal loyalty, collegiality and collaboration, and
adherence to fundamental virtues, including justice and courage. Systemic changes needed to
promote the bold idea include support for change at the institutional level, which may entail
operational changes, and building public support.
Examples of action plan steps to achieve the bold idea include creation of a centralized, publicly
available resource of existing standards, guidelines, and best practices influential in creating an
ethical work environment for nurses, and inclusion of emerging concepts about an ethical culture
in the activities of nursing credentialing boards.
Literature Review
Ethics has been integral to the nursing profession from its earliest beginnings, when Florence
Nightingale and other early path-breakers articulated the ethical foundations of nursing practice.
This foundation is vital for the future of nursing as the profession rises to the challenges of a
rapidly evolving health care sector.
The need for a thorough understanding of current ethical issues facing nursing, as well as
reflection on potential future challenges, prompted preparation of a review of the voluminous
recent literature in three domains: clinical practice, nursing education, and nursing research. (A
separate review of the literature on ethics in nursing policy was not performed, in the belief that

policy issues would emerge from consideration of the other three domains. Nor was a separate
review of the philosophical and theoretical literature related to nursing ethics included. Finally,
the research ethics section does not include research about nursing ethics. All represent topics for
future work.)
The literature review was intended not only to uncover what is known about nursing ethical
issues and practices and the strength of that knowledge, but also to find out what is not known.
Detailed reports on the literature reviews will be submitted for publication in appropriate
journals at a later date and their publication announced on the nursing ethics website.

Next Steps
Nursing Summit participants and partners have committed to putting the blueprint into action
and transforming the vision into reality. Over the next year, project organizers and partners will
be moving forward to disseminate the ideas generated by the summit and initiate change in the
four domains. Specifically, they will focus their efforts around the following:

Disseminating the report and the blueprints for clinical practice, education, policy, and
research
Refining, collaborating on, and implementing portions of the action plans
Building a directory of nurses with expertise in ethics
Preparing for launch of the ANA revised Code of Ethics, June 2015
Collaborating with others to increase visibility of nursing ethics within healthcare
Engaging the public in dialogue about ethical issues in healthcare
Aligning the Blueprint for Nursing Ethics with the strategic priorities of professional
nursing organizations
Securing endorsements of the vision, intended to capture the spirit of collegiality and
commitment from the summit.

For more information contact: Cynda H. Rushton PhD, RN, FAAN, Johns Hopkins School of
Nursing and the Anne and George L. Bunting Professor of Clinical Ethics at the Berman Institute
of Bioethics, at [email protected]., or (410) 614-2223.
For media inquiries contact:
Danielle Kress
Johns Hopkins School of Nursing
[email protected]; (410) 955-2840

Leah Ramsay, Berman Institute of Bioethics

[email protected]; (202) 642-9640

Additional information on nursing ethics developed by the Nursing Ethics Summit:

Nursing Ethics Summit website: http://www.bioethicsinstitute.org/nursingethics
What Keeps Nurses Up at Night: http://youtu.be/pOakDs41IsI
#NursingEthics Twitter Chats: http://bioethicsbulletin.org/archive/nursingethics-chat
Nursing Ethics Blogs http://bioethicsbulletin.org/archive/category/contributors/nursing-ethics