Send a letter to Johnson & Johnson

Send a letter to Johnson & Johnson to urge the company to stress nurses' skills (rather than emotional imagery) in future nursing recruitment ads.


Subject: (please sum up your views here)*
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Message:*	Dear Johnson & Johnson: I am writing to thank you for all the resources you have put into the Campaign for Nursing's Future, but also to urge you to emphasize nurses' life-saving clinical skills (rather than emotional imagery) in your high-impact television and video materials. First, I commend you for your support for nursing education, and for the helpful Campaign web site and the "Nurse Scientists" video. These aspects of the Campaign appear to have made significant contributions to the nursing profession, no doubt helping to increase interest in nursing careers. I know nurses appreciate it in the midst of the global nursing crisis. However, I must also urge you to focus, in your future television ads, on showing that nurses are autonomous professionals who save lives and improve patient outcomes. I am afraid that the current "nurse's touch" commercials, like the prior "dare to care" materials, rely heavily on traditional angel and maternal imagery. Nurses do "care" deeply about patients. But they express that not only by holding hands and stroking foreheads, but by acting as skilled advocates, educators, and innovators who are vital to public health. Many nurses like the soft, compassionate image. But when that image is the main theme of a media item, it reinforces the view that nursing is a paid mothering job for those without other good options. One of the new commercials suggests that nurses are good at "alerting the doctor," but it gives no indication that nurses know how to save a patient's life on their own. Such handmaiden images, along with the angel and maternal images, are key factors in the nursing crisis your Campaign is trying to address. The nursing crisis did not occur because people forgot that nurses are "caring." Nursing enjoys public affection, but not enough understanding or real respect. Nurses regularly win polls as the "most trusted," but a JWT Communications study in 2000 found that private school students thought nursing was too lowly for them. In order for nursing to attract sufficient resources for clinical practice, education and research--prerequisites to resolving the shortage--society must understand nursing's value to patient outcomes. No health decision maker today is going to give nursing adequate resources if she believes that it is mainly about unskilled "touching" and "caring." And it is not clear how long new or veteran nurses will remain at the bedside if resources continue to be allocated on the basis of that view. The compassionate image reflects something of real value to patient care, but that image has not done nursing justice in recent decades, and it will not in the decades to come. Therefore, I urge you to withdraw the "nurse's touch" ads. I hope you will create new ones that send a powerful message about modern nurses' tangible contributions to patient outcomes. I know that nursing advocates who have looked closely at the relation between media images and the nursing crisis would be pleased to help you do so, even if that merely entails directing you to nursing leaders who are well qualified to advise you.
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