Publication Ethics Statement
Ethical Guidelines for Contributors
Voices of Care: Reflections from Nursing and the Health Professions invites health professionals to share creative work arising from their lives, work, observations, and experiences. We believe that art and writing can illuminate dimensions of healthcare that are difficult to capture in other ways—and that these acts of expression carry ethical responsibilities.
We welcome work that is honest, searching, imaginative, and complex. At the same time, we ask contributors to approach the lives and experiences of patients, families, colleagues, and communities with particular care. Please keep the following principles in mind.
Protect Privacy and Confidentiality
Healthcare professionals have an especially important responsibility to safeguard patient privacy and confidentiality. If your work draws upon a patient encounter or another person’s healthcare experience, remove or substantially alter details that could allow that person to be recognized.
Simply changing a name may not be enough. Consider whether combinations of details—including age, diagnosis, occupation, family circumstances, location, dates, unusual events, or other distinctive characteristics—could make someone identifiable to themselves or to others.
These considerations apply to visual art as well as writing. Images should not include recognizable patients, identifying clinical information, medical records, name bands, screens, room boards, or other confidential material unless appropriate permission for publication has been obtained.
Please consider the privacy of coworkers, students, supervisors, institutions, and other members of the healthcare team as well as patients and families. Alter or omit identifying details when appropriate, and be mindful of confidential workplace information.
Honor Consent
When another identifiable person’s story, likeness, words, or experience is central to a piece, consider whether you have their permission to make it public.
When consent is not possible or appropriate to obtain, take particular care to protect identity and consider whether the work can be transformed, fictionalized, or reframed, with transparency about choices made in the artistic process.
Please remember that a work published in Voices of Care may reach patients, families, colleagues, community members, and people who were present for the experiences it portrays.
Before submitting, we encourage you to ask: Is this my story to tell publicly? Could another person recognize themselves in this work—or be recognized by someone else? What might it feel like for them to encounter this representation of their experience?
Consider Boundaries and Readiness for Publication
We welcome work that engages honestly with difficult, painful, unresolved, or traumatic experiences. At the same time, writing or making art for oneself can be different from preparing that work for a public audience.
We encourage contributors to submit work that feels intentional, thoughtfully revised, and attentive to boundaries—work in which you have made conscious choices about what to reveal, what to withhold, and how an experience is shaped for a reader or viewer.
Trauma-informed creative practice does not require avoiding difficult material or arriving at a neat resolution. Rather, it asks us to attend to agency, boundaries, context, and care: our own, those of people represented in the work, and those of our audience.
You might ask yourself: What belongs in this piece? What does not need to be disclosed? What do I want this work to do in the world?
Create with Respect and Humility
We ask contributors to resist stereotyping or reducing people to diagnoses. Whenever representing someone else, consider the fullness of their humanity and the limits of what you can know about their experience.
Remain attentive to your own position within the experiences you represent, including the influence of professional role, culture, identity, assumptions, and bias.
When writing about patients, families, colleagues, or communities, distinguish where possible between what you observed and what you imagine, interpret, or believe.
Help Readers Approach Difficult Material
Healthcare encompasses experiences of illness, death, grief, trauma, violence, discrimination, disability, mental health, reproductive health, substance use, and many other subjects that may be difficult for readers.
We do not want contributors to avoid difficult material; such experiences are an important part of healthcare and human life. When a piece contains particularly graphic or potentially distressing material, however, please consider including a brief content note so readers can make informed choices about how and when they engage with it. The editors may also recommend a content note for an accepted piece.
Care for Yourself, Too
Creative work can bring us close to experiences that remain painful, unresolved, or emotionally charged. We encourage contributors to exercise their own judgment and boundaries about what they are ready to revisit and what they are ready to make public.
There is no obligation to disclose personal trauma or painful experiences in order to make meaningful art.
A Shared Responsibility
The editors of Voices of Care may contact contributors when a submission raises questions about privacy, consent, confidentiality, or the representation of another person. We may suggest changes or request additional information before accepting a work for publication.
Ultimately, contributors are responsible for ensuring that their work respects applicable professional and legal obligations concerning privacy and confidentiality.
We believe that art and writing can deepen our understanding of healthcare by making room for complexity, uncertainty, beauty, grief, humor, frustration, connection, and wonder. Our hope is that Voices of Care will make space for those expressions while honoring the people and communities whose lives intersect with our work.
We invite contributors to create boldly and to represent others with care.