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October 31, 2011 at 08:00 PM
“After two days in the hospital,” comic W.C. Fields once quipped, “I took a turn for the nurse.” Given the number of sanctioned advisors I read about these days, perhaps financial services professionals, both men and women, should also take a “turn for the nurse.” Here’s why.
For 11 straight years, America’s nurses have placed first in Gallup’s annual Honesty and Ethics Survey. Its most recent study (2010) revealed that 81 percent of Americans say nurses have “very high” or “high” honesty and ethical standards, and only 1 percent rated them as being very low. Nurses rated substantially higher than other well-respected professionals such as military officers, pharmacists, grade-school teachers and medical doctors.
Doing something right
Clearly, nurses are doing something right. What’s more, the health-care industry is under a lot of cost pressure, and nurses simply aren’t able to spend as much time with their patients as they once did. Yet, nurses continue to pull down enviable ethical ratings even though they have more work to do and fewer resources.
Furthermore, the compliance demands on nurses to document accidents and other bad outcomes are incredible. They’re much more intense than the compliance obligations of a typical financial advisor. So why do nurses score much higher on ethics surveys than your typical salesperson or business professional? And what can you as a financial advisor learn from them?
