Professor Cynda Rushton to Receive AACN Award for Distinguished Career

The American Association of Critical-Care Nurses (AACN) has honored Cynda Hylton Rushton, PhD, RN, FAAN, with its 2022 Marguerite Rodgers Kinney Award for a Distinguished Career.

Rushton will receive the award for her exceptional contributions that enhance the care of critically ill patients and their families and the nurses who care for them during the 2022 National Teaching Institute & Critical Care Exposition in Houston, May 16-18.

An international leader in bioethics and nursing, Rushton is the Anne and George L. Bunting Professor of Clinical Ethics at the Johns Hopkins University Berman Institute of Bioethics and the School of Nursing. She co-chairs Johns Hopkins Hospital’s Ethics Committee and Consultation Service. A founding member of the Berman Institute, she co-led the first National Nursing Ethics Summit that produced a Blueprint for 21st Century Nursing Ethics.

In 2016, she co-led a national collaborative, State of the Science Initiative: Transforming Moral Distress into Moral Resilience in Nursing and co-chaired the American Nurses Association’s professional issues panel that created “A Call to Action: Exploring Moral Resilience Toward a Culture of Ethical Practice.” She was a member of the National Academies of Medicine, Science and Engineering Committee that produced the report “Taking Action Against Clinician Burnout: A Systems Approach to Professional Well-Being.”

“Dr. Rushton is an internationally recognized leader in nursing ethics, moral resilience and workforce issues and a longtime contributor to groundbreaking work on these topics,” said AACN President Beth Wathen. “Her work has influenced nursing practice, health policy and patient care.”

A member of AACN since 1979, Rushton is a frequent presenter at NTI and regularly contributes to AACN’s clinical journals.

She is a member of the American Nurses Association’s Center for Ethics and Human Rights Ethics Advisory Board and the American Nurses Foundation’s Well-Being Initiative Advisory Board.

Rushton is the chief synergy strategist for Maryland’s R3 Resilient Nurses Initiative, a statewide initiative to build resilience and ethical practice in nursing students and novice nurses.

She is a Hastings Center fellow, chair of the Hastings Center Fellows Council and a fellow of the American Academy of Nursing.

She is the editor and author of Moral Resilience: Transforming Moral Suffering in Healthcare, the first book to explore the emerging concept of moral resilience from a variety of perspectives including nursing, bioethics, philosophy, psychology, neuroscience and contemplative practice.

She earned her bachelor’s degree in nursing at the University of Kentucky, followed by a master’s degree in nursing at the Medical University of South Carolina and a PhD from Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C.