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What can you do to shape a better image of nursing?
Take action with our plan to remedy the nursing image and the nursing profession
In Saving Lives, the book by our leaders Sandy and Harry Summers, there is an extensive plan laid out in two chapters which maps out how nurses can change how the world thinks about them.
But the plan is not limited only to nurses, one of the chapters is directed at non-nurses, who can do much to change how the world thinks about nursing. This is a necessary step to ending the crippling global nursing shortage.
See more about Saving Lives: Why the Media's Portrayal of Nurses Puts Us All at Risk
Everyone has their own abilities and interests. So we have broken down the suggested actions into categories. Please select the description that best fits your background and consider what you can do to help us repair the image of nursing. Thank you.
General public, nurses and nursing students
Nursing Scholars and Researchers
Nursing Organizations, Schools and Journals
Action needed from the General Public, Nurses and Nursing Students
Present a Positive Personal Image
Learn How To Affect and Create Media
Strengthen the Nursing Profession
- Letter-writing campaigns--please write a letter for each of our campaigns.
- Submit story ideas to our database so the media can use these ideas to help the media build stories from a nursing perspective.
- Create a "Be a Nurse for a Day" program--ask your local media to shadow you at work so they can learn what you do and create media about it.
- Invite your local media to lunch to educate them about the work of nurses and to encourage them to cover the full range of nursing going on in your community. Feel free to contact the Truth to discuss further.
- Contact the US media by zip code.
- Contact US elected officials and government agency representatives on current nursing legislation from the National League of Nursing.
Speak To the World
Order our "SAVE LIVES. BE A NURSE." bumper stickers and car magnets and educate the world about the value of nursing.
- Hang our poster on nursing autonomy and responsibility and distribute it widely.
Distribute our poster on the naughty nurse stereotype.
- Start a health radio show, like HealthStyles with Diana Mason & Barbara Glickstein. Do health minutes and work to become a local health correspondent for television and radio news programs, like television commentator and author Pat Carroll.
- Who's a patient advocate anymore? All nurses should all be. Post our patient advocacy flyer on patients' walls and breakrooms. Download and distribute freely.
Teach people that the power structure in hospitals is a tribe, not a food chain.
- Write an op-ed for publication in a major newspaper or magazine. Get quick tips on how to write an effective op-ed and a list of op-ed placement opportunities, requirements and contact info.
- When you do speak publicly, make sure that readers, listeners or viewers know that you are a nurse so that nursing gets credit for your work, instead of credit going to some undefined expert. See Elizabeth Winslow's ViewPoint "We Silence Our Profession When We Fail to Identify Ourselves as Nurses" in the August 2012 AJN.
- Blog about your experiences practicing nursing.
- Wear the RN patch on your uniform. Wear uniforms that make nurses look like professionals.
- Create patient education materials--videos, articles, books, guides and web sites. The public needs to know that nurses are health education experts.
- Use nurse-friendly language.
Develop video news web programs, to help you summarize your work and make it accessible to the media. For example, consider this clip by former US AIDS Czar Kristine Gebbie, RN, DrPH, Associate Professor, Columbia School of Nursing.
- Create, read or support nurse-friendly media and art.
- Order merchandise, including RN patches, and send gifts through the Truth to support our work.
Present a Positive Personal Image
When nurses live healthy lifestyles and look like healthy people, they have more credibility as health experts. We encourage nurses to:
Attain a healthy weight and a healthy diet (go vegan; find vegan recipes)
Promote breastfeeding, flossing, seat belt and car seat adherence
See our easy plan to achieve a long and healthy life.
Join Our Member Action
- Become a member of the Truth and tell others about our work and get them involved.
- Start a chapter of the Truth in your local area.
- Monitor the media and alert us to noteworthy portrayals of nursing. Set your DVR, TiVo or DVD recorder to record every time you watch television. If you see a nursing portrayal you'd like us to consider covering, let us know.
- Register with our Nurse Expert Database. We are looking for nurses interested in provided their nursing expertise to the media, or to us, when either one of us has questions that you may know the answer to. We can't promise a media appearance, but it we have an opportunity for a certain type of nurse in a certain location, it would help us to have a solid list on nurses on which to rely. Please add your name to our nurse expert database. Thank you!
- Help connect us with potential funders to strengthen the Truth's reach.
Engage Friends and Colleagues
- Distribute our news alerts by email (sign up, or see news alert archives).
- Create bulletin boards of our news alerts at your work place or school.
- Distribute our brochures to your colleagues, friends and students--just let us know how many you need at info@truthaboutnursing.org
- Giving a presentation? Get a draft powerpoint presentation and some film clips here.
- Start a Nurse Shadowing Program for medical students and interns at your hospital or school. We must educate physicians as to the nature of nursing work so they can play a more positive role in creating nursing-related media, and so we can develop more collaborative relationships, which lead to better patient outcomes. See a sketch of a nurse shadowing program at Dartmouth.
Learn How To Affect and Create Media
- Read an excellent and succinct earned media outreach kit on the US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration website.
- Learn how to write powerful letters.
- Get media savvy through media training--so you'll feel more confident presenting your ideas to the media.
- How to Promote Yourself as a TV Guest by the Author of "You're On The Air" explains how to be a TV guest
Strengthen the nursing profession through:
- Recruitment into the profession;
- Fixing the huge funding disparity between nursing and other health careers;
- Increasing the number of men in the profession. Join the AAMN or men's nursing organization in your country--whether you're a man or not;
- Working for magnet status at your institution;
- Working beyond Magnet recommendations to improving nursing at your institution. See our recommendations.
- Implementing shared governance at your institution (read how it works);
- Working for safe staffing levels;
- Nurturing the next generation of nurses;
- Strengthening and empowering school nurses;
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Donating to Nurses House to support nurses in need;
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Strengthening holism practice and awareness in nursing by joining the American Holistic Nurses Association; and also join Urban Zen and bring alternative modalities into the clinical setting to strengthen patient care.
- Create nurse-run patient advocacy organizations to strengthen nurses' ability to advocate for patient health;
- Advocate for nursing with your legislators. Read this how-to manual from Advance for Nurse Practitioners.
- Create health care environments using evidence-based designs to promote better patient outcomes and less stress on nurses. For guidance, seek help from The Nursing Institute for HealthCare Design.
- Start a summer camp for kids that inspire them to be nurses, like the BONES camp at University of North Carolina Wilmington as portrayed in the article "Fake disaster may make for real careers."
- Join Energise for Excellence in the UK
- Become a nurse!
How Foundations Can Help Strengthen the Nursing Image and Profession
- Consider funding the Truth's work.
- Consider sponsoring and endowing the Nobel Prize for Nursing.
- Consider funding and endowing the Modern Museum of Nursing.
- Consider funding efforts to strengthen nursing clinical practice as we have outlined on our page about improving Magnet Hospital standards.
How Nursing Faculty Can Help Strengthen the Nursing Image
- Nursing professors: Planning your curriculum? We have ideas...
- Have your students write biographies on our nursing pioneers.
- Read "Raising the Profile of Nursing Issues in the Media and other Public Fora" by Claire Fagin.
- Please assign or encourage your students to write letters for all of our letter-writing campaigns or ask them to write biographies on our nursing pioneers.
- Teach medical students and physicians about nursing. They need to learn what nurses do to save and improve lives, and how and why they should work collaboratively with nurses. Make it your school's goal to establish at least one class about nursing with your closest neighboring medical school. Physicians are some of the worst purveyors of negative media images of nursing. We must educate them about the scientific expertise of nurses. Please tell us when you've set up classes for medical students so that we can build a database of successful efforts. See a sketch of a nurse shadowing program at Dartmouth.
How Nursing Scholars and Researchers Can Help Strengthen the Nursing Image
- Consider the final stage of your research to be publication in the lay press. Call and meet with members of your local media to facilitate press coverage of your research results.
- Seek out appointments in schools of medicine to teach physicians and medical students in the area of your expertise.
How Nursing Organizations, Schools and Journals Can Help Strengthen the Nursing Image
- Develop a prominent link on your main page to explain your subspecialty of nursing to the general public. The link might read like: "What is dermatology nursing?" And then please link them to a page where you have an easy-to-understand definition.
- Build a list and establish relationships with your local health journalists. Invite them to seminars, conferences and lunch. Invite them to speak or moderate a panel or conference.
- Offer to be a resource person for them--be reliable and credible.
- Pitch the media story ideas every so often. Be tenacious, but don't badger. Have a compelling story or issue to pitch including conflict, controversy, injustice, irony, or something ground breaking.
Have images and a human story ready.
- Control the story.
Identify one to three main points.
Create the sound bite or rhetoric.
Anticipate the opposing arguments. Provide data.
- Develop a large nurse expert database of nurses expert in their field, from a wide geographic area to have on hand when the media calls to speak to an expert.
- Train at least a core group of your nurse experts in media skills.
- Don't release research results in a vacuum--use your experts' research and clinical work to promote desirable health policies. Such a press release is more likely to get picked up by the media--in addition to promoting better health policies.
- Find a media person to write press releases, respond quickly to journalists and pitch stories to the media.
- Send thanks to the media for good or three dimensional coverage of nursing issues--whether or not the coverage is in your subspecialty.
- Send feedback to journalists who ignore nursing and focus only on physicians. Offer to provide them with nursing experts on similar stories in the future.
- Offer media awards for best coverage in your subspecialty.
- Develop art and children's books and games to stimulate wide interest in your specialty.
- Mobilize your base and work with The Truth About Nursing to protest objectionable portrayals of nursing.
- Send members of the media complementary subscriptions to your journal, newsletters or publications.
Please support The Truth About Nursing
The Truth is supported by three major means:
- Volunteer labor. Our executive director and senior advisor donate all their time to the Truth;
- Member donations. Please support us by becoming a member;
- Speaking engagements. Please invite Sandy Summers to give a speaking engagement at your next event.
Thank you for your support! We cannot do this without you!
Other ideas? Please email us your suggestions.
The URL for this page is www.truthaboutnursing.org/action/
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