Provision 9
Nurses and their professional organizations work to enact and resource practices, policies, and legislation to promote social justice, eliminate health inequities, and facilitate human flourishing.
9.2 Commitment to Society
Society establishes a reciprocal covenant with nursing and grants authority to nursing to provide care for the health and well-being of all members of society. Nurses are trusted to provide competent and compassionate care grounded in ethics. The goals of the profession are achieved through nursing’s fidelity to the enduring nurse-to-patient and nurse-to-society relationships rooted in trust. Economic priorities and pressures, corporatized and for-profit healthcare, overreliance on technology, and emphasis on the performative nature of professionalism or technique threaten to undermine nursing’s social covenant, resulting in an emphasis on the transactional rather than the relational aspect of the profession. Individual civic engagement and nursing’s civic professionalism embody nursing’s covenant and affirm the mutual expectations and responsibilities between nursing and society.
To fulfill nursing goals for a healthy and just society, nursing education ought to provide sustained opportunities for the development of skills that facilitate civic engagement and foster societal flourishing. Nursing curricula and formation, research and healthcare policy education, and professional development should prepare nurses to address unjust systems. The nursing profession upholds the public’s trust, in part, by its deliberate and intentional education in advocacy and allyship to create just systems.