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How nursing faculty, scholars and researchers can help strengthen the nursing image

Nursing professors: Planning your curriculum? We have ideas...

Have your students write biographies on our nursing pioneers.

Have your school join the Coalition for Better Understanding of Nursing!

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.

"Pick up that RN flag and wave it," as NurseWeek editor Pam Meredith once said in an editorial. Don't hide your RN from the media or the public. If they give you an option to choose only one identifier, choose the RN. Then the public will see you as a bright, educated nurse working to improve health care. If you only choose the PhD, credit for your work will go to some other profession, but it surely will not go to nursing. So please highlight your nurse status first and your degrees second, because nursing is the most important part of what we need you to present to the public, to highlight the valuable things nurses are doing to improve health care.

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.

If you teach at a school of nursing and assign the purchase of Saving Lives by each student for required reading for your class, Sandy Summers would be happy do an online presentation / seminar / engagement with your students for only a $100 dollar donation to the Truth About Nursing. Please contact Sandy at ssummers@truthaboutnursing.org to discuss. Thank you!


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A Few Successes —
We Can Change the Media!

Educate the world that nurses save lives!


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