Cynthia Ann LaSala, MS, RN
Cynthia Ann LaSala has been a unit-based Clinical Nurse Specialist since coming to the Massachusetts General Hospital in 2002. She has served in that role on Phillips 20, a 20-bed acute, adult medical unit since April 2007. Cynthia received her Master of Science degree in Nursing at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, College of Nursing and Health Sciences (high honors) with specialization in gerontology. With over 30 years of nursing experience, Cynthia has served in a variety of clinical and educational roles which includes 15 years in the Department of Veterans Affairs as an Instructor in Nursing/Employee Education at the VA Boston Healthcare System. Over the past 35 years, Cynthia has been involved in professional organizational work at state, local, and national levels and is currently serving her second four-year term as an appointed member of the Ethics Advisory Board, American Nurses Association Center for Ethics and Human Rights. Cynthia has been a member of the MGH Patient Care Services Ethics in Clinical Practice Committee since 2003, served as Coach from 2007 to 2010, and was appointed as Advisor to the Committee in January 2011. She also serves on the MGH Ethics Task Force and Harvard Teaching Hospitals Ethics Leaders Group. Cynthia has published on topics such as moral leadership, creating work environments that promote moral courage in nursing, and moral accountability and integrity in nursing. Cynthia is particularly interested in patient autonomy as it relates to advance care planning and health care decision making, ethical dilemmas that cause moral distress among interdisciplinary clinicians, and the use of moral courage in nursing as a self-empowering tool to assess and intervene in ethical dilemmas in practice.
