When surveyed which profession was chosen by the general public as the highest in honesty and ethics?

The American public say nurses have the highest honesty and ethical standards according to the annual Gallup poll of trust in professions.

Eighty percent of Americans say nurses have “very high” or “high” standards of honesty and ethics. The results for nurses are 15 points above any other profession. Nursing has been voted as the most honest and ethical profession in America for the past 13 years.

Gallup has been asking to rate the honest and ethics of various professions annually since 1990, and periodically since 1976. Gallup says “nurses have topped the list each year since they were first included in 1999.”

Medical doctors and pharmacists tie this year for second place at 65%, with police officers and clergy approaching 50%.

The American Nurses Association (ANA) note the survey supports their yearlong campaign to highlight the importance of nursing ethics and their impact on patients and healthcare quality in the U.S.

“All nurses share the critical responsibility to adhere to the highest ethical standards in their practice to ensure they provide superior health care to patients and society,” said ANA President Pamela F. Cipriano, PhD, RN, NEA-BC, FAAN. “ANA is calling 2015 the Year of Ethics to highlight ethics as an essential component of everyday nursing practice and reinforce the trust patients have that nurses will protect their health and safety, and advocate on their behalf.”

Recently, ANA completed a revision of its Code of Ethics for Nurses that serves as a guide to the nursing profession to uplift the best interests of patients, families, and communities. The new Code reflects many changes and evolutions in health care and considers the most current ethical challenges nurses face in practice.

The revised code will be released early 2015. The revision involved a four-year process in which a committee received and evaluated comments on ethics issues from thousands of nurses.

Nurses and other healthcare professionals persevered through 2021 and its obstacles, including the COVID-19 pandemic, staff shortages, and increasing rates of burnout, and their selflessness, drive, and honesty have not gone unnoticed by the American public, according to Gallup’s annual Most Honest and Ethical Professions Poll. In results released in January 2022, Americans ranked nurses as the most honest professionals for the 20thconsecutive year on a list that also included physicians, grade-school teachers, pharmacists, and other professions.

In the survey, 81% of respondents rated the honesty and ethical standards of nurses and the profession as very high or high. Medical doctors followed nurses with 67% of respondents rating the profession very high or high, and grade-school teachers took third place with 64% of respondents rating the profession very high or high. According to Gallup, since the organization added nurses to the survey in 1999, the profession has topped the list all but once: In 2001, nurses were displaced by firefighters in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks.

“Three of the top four—nurses, medical doctors, and pharmacists—are medical professions that enjoyed boosted ratings in 2020, likely because of their service to the public during the pandemic. The 2020 rating for nurses was the highest for any profession other than firefighters in 2001, whereas that year’s physicians’ rating was the highest ever for that profession,” Gallup said.

“2021 was an incredibly difficult year for individual nurses and the nursing profession. Many suffered greatly while having a critical role in the colossal response and recovery efforts to end the COVID-19 pandemic,” American Nurses Association President Ernest Grant, PhD, RN, FAAN, said in response to the poll’s results. “The fact that this is the 20th year in a row that the American public has voted nurses #1 is a testament to nurses’ consistent professionalism, despite the challenges of the persistent pandemic.”

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Nursing is the leading profession when it comes to ethics and honesty, according to a well-known poll. Among professions surveyed by the annual Gallup honesty/ethics poll, nurses have been at the top of the list since 2001, and remain there after the latest survey conducted in December 2016. In that survey, 84% of respondents rated nurses as being very high or high as professionals who are honest and ethical. Nurses ranked at the top among 22 professions listed in the most recent survey.

Eileen Williamson, RN

“For the 15th consecutive year nursing again has received the amazing honor of being ranked the most trusted profession in the country by the American public,” said Eileen Williamson, MSN, RN, senior vice president and chief nurse executive at Nurse.com. “Few designations could be more of a professional badge of honor than being named first among the 22 professions surveyed in the Gallup poll for honesty and ethical standards. As a nurse, I could not be more proud of what the public thinks of my colleagues and the nursing profession.”

In the survey, respondents are asked to rate the honest and ethical standards of people in different fields, choosing among very high, high, average, low and very low. For the past 15 years, pharmacists and medical doctors ranked just below nurses, with members of Congress at the bottom of the list. This year, 67% of respondents rated pharmacists high or very high and 65% rated medical doctors high or very high.

In all 15 years, no lower than 79% of respondents ranked nurses as high or very high in honesty and ethics, according to the Gallup poll. “We’re allowed into some of the most private moments and important times of patients’ lives,” Williamson said. “Our focus on confidentiality and professionalism shows and both patients and the general public have noticed.”

Gallup conducts the surveys via telephone interviews with a random sampling of ate least 1,000 adults ages 18 and older living in the U.S. The margin of sampling error for this year’s survey was  + or – 4 percentage points, according to Gallup. “Few other professions [besides healthcare] fare so well in Gallup’s annual look at honesty and ethical standards among various fields,” wrote Jim Norman, in a Dec. 19 online article posted on Gallup.com.“Healthy majorities of the American public continue to show a willingness to trust the honest and ethical standards of healthcare providers — nurses, doctors, pharmacists and dentists,” he wrote.

Nurses have topped the list every year but once since Gallup began including nursing in the polls in 1999. Firefighters topped the list in 2001, when Gallup included that profession in its survey after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. “Whether nurses are by the bedside or in the board room, we continue to be a trusted resource and a vital part of our nation’s healthcare system,” Pamela F. Cipriano, PhD, RN, NEA-BC, FAAN, president of the American Nurses Association, said in an ANA news release. “This poll reflects the trust the public has in us, and we’ll continue to work hard to keep that trust.”

A recent Great Britain survey showed similar results for 2016. Nurses were for the first time included in an annual survey that ranks professionals most trusted by the public, according to an online article published Dec. 5 by QZ.com. “Of 1,019 British participants aged 15 and over, 93% trusted nurses to tell them the truth. Doctors and teachers came next, at 91% and 88%, respectively,” according to the article. “In Australia, nurses and firefighters had the highest level of trust  (95% each), closely followed by doctors (94%), paramedics (94%) and pharmacists (93%),” according to a 2016 report, the article stated.

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