Contributor – Jerome Visperas Cleofas
Author – Jerome Visperas Cleofas PhD, RN
First published: 2026
Major Concepts
Nursing stakeholdership: the active involvement of nursing and nursing-related actors in a multistakeholder network. It includes the actions, expressions, involvements, and resources that nurses, nursing groups, nursing institutions, and other nursing-related agents use to influence, respond to, or participate in decisions, systems, technologies, and policies that affect health and healthcare.
Artificial intelligence (AI) in healthcare: Computational systems that can support healthcare activities; a technical tool and a social and ethical force that can affect rights, equity, care quality, and professional practice.
Healthcare artificial intelligence governance ecosystem: the network of systems, challenges, stakeholders, mechanisms, and policies that shape how AI is developed, used, monitored, and regulated in healthcare (represented by the entirety of the figure).
Nursing academia: includes nursing departments, colleges, schools, research centers, and other higher education or research institutions that educate nurses, produce nursing scholarship, and engage communities and policy spaces.
Governance domains: the main areas where nursing academia can participate in healthcare AI governance (axis 1: “what”). These include (a) framing, (b) risk/benefit assessment, (c) evaluation, and (d) risk management.
Academic modalities: The main ways nursing academia acts as a stakeholder (axis 2: “how”). These are (1) instruction, (2) research, and (3) service/extension.
Human rights-based approach: An approach that guides governance, policy, education, and practice by centering human dignity, equality, participation, accountability, and justice (axis 3: “to whom + to what end”).
Typology
A normative conceptual framework for nursing academia’s stakeholdership in healthcare artificial intelligence governance; may be used to guide nursing academic institutions towards instruction, research, and service/extension as expressions of institutional engagement in the governance of AI-enabled healthcare.
Brief Description
The Human Rights-Based Stakeholdership Framework of Nursing Academia in the Healthcare AI Governance Ecosystem explains how nursing academic institutions can actively shape the governance of artificial intelligence in healthcare. It begins from the view that healthcare AI is not only a technical innovation. It is also a nursing, ethical, educational, political, and human rights concern. The framework positions nursing academia as a stakeholder in the healthcare AI governance ecosystem. As seen in the five panels of the figure, this ecosystem includes AI systems, governance challenges, stakeholders, governance mechanisms, and policies. Within this ecosystem, nursing academia can contribute through its three core academic functions: instruction, research, and service/extension.
The framework is organized around three axes. The first axis is the domain of stakeholdership, which refers to what nursing academia can do in AI governance. These domains include framing AI-related healthcare challenges, assessing risks and benefits, evaluating governance options, and managing risks. The second axis is the modality of stakeholdership, which refers to how nursing academia acts. Through instruction, nursing schools can prepare students, faculty, and practitioners to understand AI literacy, algorithmic bias, transparency, data privacy, informed consent, and human rights. Through research, nursing scholars can examine how AI affects patients, nurses, communities, health systems, and marginalized groups. Through service/extension, nursing academic institutions can engage communities, convene dialogues, support public education, and participate in policy advocacy. The third axis is the human rights axis, which asks for whom and to what end nursing academia engages in AI governance.
The framework identifies two key groups: rights claimants and duty bearers. Rights claimants include patients, communities, students, faculty, nurses, healthcare workers, civil society organizations, and marginalized groups. Duty bearers include governments, healthcare institutions, AI developers, medical technology industries, regulatory bodies, and international organizations.
Within this framework, nursing academia has two linked roles. It empowers rights claimants by helping them understand, claim, and participate in decisions about their rights in AI-enabled healthcare. It also capacitates and holds duty bearers accountable by helping them meet ethical and human rights obligations. Overall, the framework calls nursing academia to move beyond passive observation of healthcare AI. Through education, research, service, and advocacy, nursing academic institutions can help ensure that AI-enabled healthcare remains safe, equitable, ethical, accountable, and grounded in human rights.
Primary Source
Cleofas, J. V. (2026). Towards a framework for human rights-based stakeholdership of nursing academia in the healthcare artificial intelligence governance ecosystem: A discussion paper. Nurse Education in Practice, 92(104737), 104737. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.nepr.2026.104737
Primary Web Resource
Nursing Academia and AI Governance: Why Human Rights Must Guide the Future of Healthcare Technology
About Jerome Visperas Cleofas PhD, RN
Jerome (he/they/siya) is a queer registered nurse and health social scientist from the Philippines. By bringing sociology and critical philosophies into conversation with nursological thought, he critiques, expands, and (re)imagines the nursing discipline—continuously interrogating what nursing is, knows, does, and can become.
Jerome’s scholarship is deeply informed by his Filipino heritage, bilingualism (i.e., English and Tagalog), and over a decade of community health nursing work, alongside current engagements with both nursing and social scientific communities. A central focus of his work is decolonizing nursing knowledge to promote epistemic justice and intellectual solidarity. To this end, Jerome developed “Pluriverse of Nursologies” as a core philosophical underpinning that aims to decenter colonial/hegemonic nursing and views the discipline as a pluricentric ecology of interconnected nursologies. He further demonstrates the salience of Global South perspectives through “Narsolohiyang Pilipino” (Filipino Nursologies)—a paradigm that integrates Filipino lifeways, languages, diasporic experiences, and sociocultural realities into nursing theory.
Jerome’s theoretical and philosophical works reflect on how intersectional justice can be embedded in nursological knowledge(s), how nursing theorizing is embodied, relational, and sociopolitical, and how nursing can act as a knowledge ecosystem and social institution to promote social justice and planetary health.