Creating an ethical practice environment – Cynda Rushton

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Episode 73 | Duration: 34:48

Cynda Hylton Rushton, PhD, MSN, RN, is the Anne and George L. Bunting Professor of Clinical Ethics at the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics and School of Nursing, and co-chairs Johns Hopkins Hospital’s Ethics Committee and Consultation Service. In 2016, she co-led a national collaborative State of the Science Initiative: Transforming Moral Distress into Moral Resilience in Nursing and co-chaired the American Nurses Association’s professional issues panel that created A Call to Action: Exploring Moral Resilience Toward a Culture of Ethical Practice. She was a member of the National Academies of Medicine, Science and Engineering Committee that produced the report Taking Action Against Clinician Burnout: A Systems Approach to Professional Well-being. She is a member of the American Nurses Association Center for Ethics & Human Rights Ethics Advisory Board and American Nurses Foundation Well-Being Initiative Advisory Board. She is the editor and author of Moral Resilience: Transforming Moral Suffering in Healthcare. Dr. Rushton is a Hastings Center fellow and chair of the Hastings Center Fellows Council and a fellow of the American Academy of Nursing.

In this episode, Dr. Rushton talks about the concept of values discordance, and what happens when a person perceives their personal or professional values to be out of alignment with their organization’s values. She shares how values play out in an organization – through leadership, decision making and budgeting. She also digs into the link between values and moral injury, and how ethics considerations need to be a central component of leaders’ wellbeing and leadership strategies. Additionally, Dr. Rushton lays out a structure for how leaders can safeguard ethics and values through leadership and safety infrastructure to support expectations and accountability, practice integration, continuous improvement, and competency building.

Links related to Dr. Rushton’s episode:

• Nursing Management article, Perceived organizational effectiveness, moral injury, and moral resilience among nurses during the COVID-19 pandemic: secondary analysis
  
• Journal of Internal Medicine article, Working in value-discrepant environments inhibits clinicians’ ability to provide compassion and reduces well-being: A cross-sectional study