“American Nursing Association Pamela Cipriano called the code the “cornerstone of nursing’s pride” and encouraged all nurses to “learn its provisions and live them.” Murphy News Service photo by Louis Fine
By Kaitlin Merkel/Murphy News Service
The American Nursing Association (ANA) released the first revised version of its Code of Ethics since 2001 in January as part of its “Year of Ethics” campaign.
So the University of Minnesota School of Nursing celebrated the revised code Thursday with “Patients First: Doing What’s Right Every Time” at Northrop Auditorium, featuring ANA President Pamela Cipriano.
“The public places its faith in nurses to practice ethically,” Cipriano said recently in an ANA press release. “A patient’s health, autonomy and even life or death, can be affected by a nurse’s decisions and actions.”
Cipriano called the code the “cornerstone of nursing’s pride” at the U event and encouraged all nurses to “learn its provisions and live them.”
The revised 76-page code took four years to edit, a process that included comments submitted from several thousand registered nurses across the nation.
Martha Turner, ANA’s assistant director at the Center for Ethics and Human Rights, said the revisions were necessary “because the code is a living document. About every 10 years, the language becomes dated.”
Turner, who worked directly with writing and editing of the code revisions, said the main edits include updated language, reorganized content and standards regarding new situations with “technology, social media and genetics.”
“We emphasized leadership and strength in the voice of nurses in social and health policy, both nationally and globally,” Turner said.
Teddie Potter, University of Minnesota nursing professor, holds up a copy of the new ANA Code of Ethics. Murphy News Service photo by Louis Fine.
Key provisions in the nine-part code include:
- practicing with compassion
- commitment to the patient
- authority to make decisions to provide optimal care
- advancing the profession through research
- collaborating with peers to reduce health disparities.
ANA defines its code, which Turner said is the most widely used in the United States, as “a succinct statement of the ethical values, obligations, duties and professional ideas of nurses individually and collectively,” as “the profession’s non-negotiable ethical standard,” and as “an expression of nursing’s own understanding of its commitment to society.”
ANA’s revised version “ensures that the code reflects modern clinical practice and evolving conditions, and fully addresses transformations in health care., the ANA stated.
ANA said ethics are especially important to the field of nursing, which was ranked by Americans as the top profession for honesty and ethical standards for the 13th year in a row by a Gallup survey in December 2014.
Turner said ethics are essential to the field of nursing because of the public’s trust and because of nurse’s “social contract and covenant with the public
“We need to live up to it … we take action and make decisions that affect the health of the public,” Turner said.
Reporter Kaitlin Merkel is studying journalism at the University of Minnesota.