We have now reviewed Provisions 1 through 7 of the 2025 ANA Code of Ethics for Nurses. Today, we turn to Provision 8, which focuses on collaboration, within nursing, across disciplines, and with the public, to achieve greater ends for health. This provision underscores that meaningful progress in health and healthcare requires relationships built on trust, transparency, and shared purpose.

8.1 Collaboration Imperative

Many healthcare challenges cannot be solved by one discipline alone. Nurses collaborate through networking, advocacy, leadership, and diplomacy;  partnering with other nurses, interprofessional colleagues, patients, communities, and policymakers. Effective collaboration relies on listening, mutual trust, respect, shared decision-making, accountability, and open communication. It also includes elevating voices that are too often silenced and bringing nursing’s unique perspective to the table.

Collaboration is central to sustaining the workforce. Academic institutions, healthcare organizations, businesses, and policymakers must work together to educate, recruit, and retain nurses across diverse settings. System-level solutions such as shared governance, strong workplace safety programs, transformational leadership, and evidence-based transition-to-practice initiatives help address staffing shortages and reduce the pressure on an under-resourced system.

8.2 Collaboration to Uphold Human Rights, Mitigate Health Disparities, and Achieve Health Equity

Nursing affirms that physical and mental health are universal human rights. Upholding those rights requires collaboration with communities to address social and structural determinants of health, support person-centered, holistic, trauma-informed, and culturally responsive care, and secure resources for individuals, families, and communities. Nurses work with interprofessional teams to prevent, treat, and control prevailing health problems and identify emerging threats.

Some priorities, such as combating human trafficking, advancing environmentally sustainable healthcare, promoting equitable access to immunizations and reproductive healthcare, and strengthening injury prevention and public education, demand coordinated efforts beyond nursing alone. As science and technology evolve, teams must design solutions that are ethical, equitable, and respectful of human rights. Researchers across disciplines should also ask hard questions and transparently expose inequities in health outcomes.

8.3 Partnership and Collaboration in Complex, Extreme, or Extraordinary Practice Settings

Nurses bring attention to human rights violations and stand in solidarity with other professions when such harms occur. Extraordinary contexts, armed conflict, pandemics, political unrest, environmental catastrophes, and other disasters, may require altered standards of care and present profound ethical challenges. Climate change intensifies these pressures and disproportionately affects marginalized populations.

In these settings, nurses engage in careful ethical discernment: clarifying intentions, weighing options, and articulating moral justifications for action. Only under exceptional circumstances may human rights concerns be balanced against other equally weighty considerations, such as overwhelming need amid scarce resources. Nurses collaborate to promote transparency, proportional and fair stewardship of resources, and alignment with international emergency management guidance, working alongside public health officials and communities throughout an event.

Provision 8 emphasizes that collaboration is both relational and strategic and unites people, disciplines, and communities to advance health, protect human rights, and sustain the nursing workforce. In our next ethics post, we will consider Provision 9, which addresses nursing’s collective responsibilities for articulating professional values, maintaining the integrity of the profession, and advancing social justice.

Please share your reflections on Provision 8 in the comments.  Where have you seen collaboration make a meaningful difference in health outcomes or professional well-being?