Provision 8
Nurses build collaborative relationships and networks with nurses, other healthcare and non-healthcare disciplines, and the public to achieve greater ends.
8.3 Partnership and Collaboration in Complex, Extreme, or Extraordinary Practice Settings
Nurses bring attention to human rights violations. Genocide, abuse, sexual assault, rape as an instrument of war, hate crimes, human trafficking, oppression, the global feminization of poverty, the exploitation of migrant workers, and all other such human rights violations are of grave concern to nurses. The nursing profession joins in solidarity with many other professions when these violations are encountered. Human rights may be jeopardized in extraordinary contexts related to fields of battle, pandemics, political turmoil, regional conflicts, environmental catastrophes, or disasters where nurses must necessarily practice in extreme settings, under altered standards of care. Nurses stress human rights protection with particular attention to preserving the human rights of disenfranchised, marginalized, or socially stigmatized groups.
All actions and omissions risk unintended consequences with implications for human rights. Thus, nurses ought to engage in discernment, carefully assessing their intentions, reflectively weighing all possible options and rationales, and formulating clear moral justifications for their actions. Only in extreme emergencies and under exceptional conditions, whether due to forces of nature or to human action, may nurses subordinate human rights concerns to other equally weighted considerations. This subordination may occur when there is both an increase in the number of ill, injured, or at-risk patients and a decrease in access to resources and healthcare personnel. Climate change, with its direct temperature-related impacts and other climate disruptions, including rising sea levels, floods, droughts, wildfires, infectious disease outbreaks, hurricanes, and tornadoes, causes devastation and has a disproportionate impact on poor and marginalized populations. Nurses engage in collaborative and collective action to counter structural, institutional, and political drivers of climate change.
Nurses work with others to promote transparency, protect the public, consider proportional restrictions of individual needs, and advocate for fair stewardship of resources. With interprofessional teams, nurses consider guidance of international emergency management standards and collaborate with public health officials and communities throughout an event.