Benjamin Hickox

Recipient of the Henry B. Spencer scholarship, Ben Hickox completed his baccalaureate degree in Psychology at Dordt College, Sioux Center, Iowa and his baccalaureate degree in Nursing at Augustana University in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. He completed a summer externship at Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, in 2004 and accepted employment as a staff nurse the next year, beginning in the Medical Cardiac Progressive Care Unit and then moving to the Medical Cardiac Intensive Care Unit in 2007, where he has worked since.

It is this decade of caring for critically-ill cardiac patients that has informed his passion for clinical ethics. Ben is currently finishing his second year of a three-year Doctor of Nursing Practice program at the University of Minnesota where his specialty track is Adult/Gerontological Clinical Nurse Specialist. He plans on focusing his career on the role of nurses in clinical ethics; particularly interventions to prevent or mitigate moral distress, which is the focus of his current doctoral project. He currently co-teaches two ethics courses for nurses at Mayo and recently presented his poster on potential interventions for moral distress at the National Nursing Ethics Conference at UCLA. He is the student representative for the Minnesota affiliate of the National Association of Clinical Nurse Specialists; is a member of Sigma Theta Tau – Zeta chapter; and has maintained membership in the American Association of Critical Care Nurses (AACN) since 2007. He is certified in Critical Care (CCRN) and Cardiac Medicine (CMC) through the AACN.