NUR 6063 Module 4 Nursing Education Leadership Ethical Decision Analysis Example

The Partner Wants the Names: An Ethical Decision Analysis of a Hospital's Request for Student Grades and Learning Contracts in Return for Funding a Faculty Position

Student Name

American College of Education

NUR6063: Visionary Leadership for Nursing Education

Module 4 Assignment

Instructor Name

February 3, 2031

The Request

The hospital that offered to fund our enrollment expansion has agreed to pay for a jointly appointed faculty position, which the program badly needs. In a meeting to finalize the agreement, the hospital's chief nursing officer made one further request. The hospital runs a new graduate residency program and wants to offer places early to our strongest students. To do that, it asked for each final-semester student's course grades and a list of students who had been placed on a clinical learning contract at any point in the program, so that it could screen them out. The officer presented the request as a natural part of the partnership and noted that the faculty position would help the program considerably.

The request is not malicious. The hospital wants safe new nurses and believes the program's records would help it choose them. But it asks me to share information that students gave the program for one purpose, their education, so that it can be used for another, their employment, and it is linked, however gently, to money the program needs.

A Framework for Deciding

I used a structured process so that the decision would rest on reasons I could explain to the students, the faculty, the college and the hospital. The steps were to establish the facts, including the law; identify the people affected and what each has at stake; identify the ethical principles and professional obligations in tension; generate the options; weigh each option against those principles; decide and act; and review the result. For the principles, I used the four set out by Beauchamp and Childress (2019): respect for autonomy, nonmaleficence, beneficence and justice. For professional obligations, I used the Code of Ethics for Nurses (American Nurses Association [ANA], 2025), which applies to nurses in education and leadership roles as well as in clinical practice, and whose provisions include the nurse's responsibility for integrity, for the ethical environment of the settings where nurses work, and for the privacy and trust of those the nurse serves.

The Facts, Including the Law

Student grades and records of learning contracts are education records. The federal regulations that implement the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act say that a postsecondary institution generally may not disclose personally identifiable information from a student's education records without the student's prior written consent, unless one of the listed exceptions applies (Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, 2024). One exception covers school officials with a legitimate educational interest, and hospital staff who supervise and evaluate our students on their units may qualify for that purpose under our affiliation agreement. Screening students for employment is not an educational purpose. Without written consent from each student, the college could not lawfully give the hospital the list it requested, and the college's registrar confirmed that reading.

The law settles the narrow question, but not the ethical one. Even if every student could be asked for consent, the request would raise the question of whether the program should help an employer screen students by their remediation history.

Weighing the Principles

Respect for autonomy favors letting students decide what information about them goes to an employer. Consent obtained in a meeting where a hospital is choosing residents would not be fully free, however, since a student who refused might reasonably fear the refusal would be noticed.

Nonmaleficence weighs heavily against sharing learning contract histories. A learning contract in our program is a remediation tool, used early and in writing so that a student can correct a pattern before it becomes a failure. If contracts become a reason to lose a job offer, students will hide their difficulties and faculty will hesitate to write contracts, which would bring back the reluctance to document weak performance that the program has been working to overcome. The harm would reach patients as well as students.

Beneficence pulls the other way. The faculty position would improve teaching for every student, and the region needs the graduates the residency would train. Refusing the request outright could weaken a partnership that serves the public.

Justice asks whether the screening would be fair. A student who struggled in the first semester, completed a learning contract and finished the program strongly has met the same standard as every other graduate. Screening that student out would penalize the use of remediation rather than any shortcoming in the graduate's competence. A program that tells students remediation is how nurses learn, and then hands remediation records to employers, is teaching one lesson and practicing another.

The Options and the Decision

I considered four options. The first, sharing the data as requested, was ruled out by the law and by the harms above. The second, refusing and ending the discussion, would protect students but risk the position and the partnership. The third, seeking blanket student consent, would be lawful but, for the reasons above, not truly voluntary. The fourth was to decline the request while offering the hospital other ways to meet its legitimate goal.

I chose the fourth. The program will not share grades or learning contract histories. Instead, students who wish to apply to the residency may give the hospital their own transcripts, as applicants to any employer can. The hospital's own staff already evaluate our students during clinical rotations on its units and may use their direct observations in hiring, as any employer uses its own observations. The program will also share aggregate outcomes each year, such as licensure pass rates and graduates' self-reported readiness, which help the hospital judge the program without identifying students. Finally, I will propose that the affiliation agreement state explicitly that the faculty position is not conditioned on any exchange of student information, which protects both parties.

Partnerships between nursing programs and health care organizations are long-standing and valuable, but an integrative review found that most published accounts were anecdotal and few formally evaluated outcomes (Beal, 2012). A partnership that is explicit about what each side contributes, and about what it does not, is more likely to last and to be worth evaluating.

Communicating and Reviewing the Decision

I explained the decision to the chief nursing officer in person before putting it in writing, beginning with the goal we share and then the reasons, including the legal constraint. I told the faculty what had been requested and what I had decided, since they write the learning contracts and needed to know that contracts would stay within the program. Students will be told, in the final-semester orientation, how to share their own records with employers if they choose. I will review the decision in a year, asking whether the partnership held, whether the residency recruited our graduates and whether faculty continued to write learning contracts when needed. A leader's ethical decision is tested by what happens next as well as by the reasoning that produced it.

References

American Nurses Association. (2025). Code of ethics for nurses. https://codeofethics.ana.org/

Beal, J. A. (2012). Academic-service partnerships in nursing: An integrative review. Nursing Research and Practice, 2012, Article 501564. https://doi.org/10.1155/2012/501564

Beauchamp, T. L., & Childress, J. F. (2019). Principles of biomedical ethics (8th ed.). Oxford University Press.

Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, 34 C.F.R. pt. 99 (2024).