Cynda Rushton: School of Nursing Faculty Directory

Overview

"Nurses have an ethical mandate to advocate on behalf of the patients and families they serve. This requires skillful discernment, ethical reasoning, and bold, clear communication."

Dr. Cynda Hylton Rushton, an internationally recognized expert in bioethics and palliative care, shares her knowledge through clinical practice, teaching, research, consultation, and scholarship. She holds a joint appointment in the Johns Hopkins University schools of Nursing and Medicine - Department of Pediatrics - and is Berman Institute of Bioethics core faculty. She serves as Co-Chair of the Johns Hopkins Hospital's Ethics Consultation Service and as Program Director of the Hopkins Children's Center's Harriet Lane Compassionate Care Program. Her scholarship focuses on palliative care, moral distress, and caregiver suffering, and conceptual foundations of integrity, respect, trust, and betrayal. She was named a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Nurse Executive Fellow (2006-2009), has served on the Institute of Medicine's Committee on increasing rates of organ donation and was a consultant to their project When Children Die. She also was appointed the first Chair of the Maryland State Council on Quality Care at the End-of-Life, has been recognized as one of Maryland's Top 100 Women, and is an American Academy of Nursing "Edgerunner." She now serves as an International Co-Director of the Nightingale Initiative for Global Health. Her current work centers on the integration of palliative care into the care of children with chronic pediatric diseases and the ethical issues faced by neuromuscular clinicians.

Areas of Scholarly Expertise and Interest

Bioethics; palliative care; ethical issues in clinical practice, particularly end-of-life decision making and pediatrics, ethics education and consultation, and the unique ethical issues that arise in nursing practice.