BY MEGAN BRENAN/Gallup
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Nurses continue to garner the highest ethics rating from Americans among a diverse list of professions, a distinction they have held for more than two decades. The 79% of U.S. adults who now say nurses have “very high” or “high” honesty and ethical standards is far more than any of the other 17 professions rated. Still, the current rating is 10 percentage points lower than the highest rating for nurses, recorded in 2020, when they were on the front lines of the COVID-19 pandemic and their ethics ratings soared.
Two other health-related professions that enjoyed similar bumps in their ethics ratings in 2020 — medical doctors and pharmacists — now rank second and third behind nurses, with 62% and 58% of Americans, respectively, rating them highly. And like nurses, both of these professions’ ethics ratings dropped significantly in 2021 and edged down further this year. All three are now below their prepandemic levels.
Pharmacists, who typically earned higher trust ratings than doctors before 2013, have ranked slightly below that profession since the pandemic and now register their lowest ethics rating in four decades of measurement (58%) by one point. Medical doctors’ rating is at its lowest point since 1999 and nurses’ since 2004.
