For the 14th consecutive year, the American public has rated nurses as the most honest and ethical working professionals in the country. According to a December 2015 Gallup poll, 85% of voters thought nurses exhibited these traits. Voters felt so strongly, in fact, that nurses placed 17% higher than the second-place entry on the list—pharmacists.
The poll asked voters to rate the honesty and ethical standards of various professionals on a scale of very high, high, average, low, or very low. Not only did nurses account for the highest percentage of high/very high votes (85%), they also accounted for the fewest average votes (13%) and by far the fewest votes for low/very low (1%).
Doctors and teachers were a few of the other highly-ranked professions on the list. Some of the low performers on the list include telemarketers, car salespeople, journalists, lawyers and lobbyists.
Ethics in Nursing
Nursing’s fourteen-year run isn’t entirely unexpected; healthcare, after all, relies on ethics and honesty to ensure patients receive the treatment needed to maintain health and wellbeing. Nurses are at the forefront of that expectation. They act as the face for many healthcare providers, and it’s a responsibility the profession takes seriously. In 2015, the American Nurses Association (ANA) revised and updated its Code of Ethics for Nurses with Interpretive Statements—a book that acts as the definitive framework for ethical analysis and decision making.
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This updated edition promises that “nurses are doing their best to provide care for their patients and their communities and are supporting each other in the process so that all nurses can fulfill their ethical and professional obligations.” It’s called “a reflection of the proud ethical heritage of nursing,” and it’s a heritage that might be missing from the executive level of many healthcare organizations. That’s why the ANA is working to spread that type of empathetic culture to the highest level of many businesses and facilities within the industry.
“Hospitals, healthcare systems, and other organizations are lacking an important perspective,” said Pamela F. Cipriano, president of the ANA. “They can’t make fully competent decisions if they don’t have registered nurses at the board table or in the C-Suite. That’s why ANA is a member of the Nurses on Boards Coalition, working to place 10,000 nurses on boards by 2020.”
Improving the Industry
2015 saw the revised and updated Code of Ethics, as well as a fourteenth consecutive first-place ranking atop the Gallup ethics polls, but the ANA isn’t finished promoting honesty. Throughout 2016, ANA will be driving a “Culture of Safety” campaign to further improve nurses’ ethical and moral standings, and to strengthen the healthcare system as a whole.
Safety is one of the ANA’s chief concerns moving forward. They’re striving to emphasize tactics and strategies that will create safer environments and practices for patients and communities. If the campaign is successful, come December 2016, all signs point to a fifteenth straight year atop Gallup’s polls for honesty and ethics.
