American Association of Critical-Care Nurses selects Cynda Rushton as 2023 Distinguished Research Lecturer

The American Association of Critical-Care Nurses (AACN) recently selected Cynda Hylton Rushton, PhD, RN, FAAN, as its 2023 Distinguished Research Lecturer. As such, Rushton will discuss her career and research journey during AACN’s National Teaching Institute & Critical Care Exposition (NTI), AACN’s annual conference.

“The research contributions of Dr. Rushton have positively transformed the practice of nurses across the healthcare continuum. As an internationally honored expert in bioethics, palliative care and a champion of the concept of moral resilience, Dr. Rushton has created a lasting impact that forever advances the care of patients and their families,” said AACN’s president, Amanda Bettencourt, PhD, APRN, CCRN-K, ACCNS-P.

NTI will be held in person May 22-24 in Philadelphia and virtually June 12-14. The American Journal of Critical Care will publish an abstract of Rushton’s NTI presentation in its May 2023 issue, followed by a complete manuscript in July 2023.

Rushton is an international leader in clinical ethics and ethical nursing practice. As an applied researcher, she has focused on diverse dimensions of bioethics, specifically palliative and end-of-life care and the moral suffering of clinicians, moral resilience and designing a culture of ethical practice and well-being.

A founding member of Johns Hopkins University Berman Institute of Bioethics, Rushton is also the Anne and George L. Bunting Professor of Clinical Ethics, one of the few endowed professorships that combine clinical ethics and nursing. In that role, in 2014, she co‐led the first National Nursing Ethics Summit that produced “A Blueprint for 21st Century Nursing Ethics.” She joined Johns Hopkins in 1991, as a faculty associate in its school of nursing and a pediatric clinical practice specialist in the hospital’s Children’s Center. She has co-chaired the ethics committee and consultation service at Johns Hopkins Hospital since 1999, conducting hundreds of ethics consultations involving complex ethical questions.

Rushton is editor and author of “Moral Resilience: Transforming Moral Suffering in Healthcare,” the first book to explore moral resilience from a variety of perspectives. The American Journal of Nursing named it one of its Books of the Year in 2020, earning first-place honors in the professional issues category.