Three Wishes letter-writing campaign

Send a letter to Three Wishes Lingerie about their "nurse" line of products!

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A copy of our executive director's letter is below--feel free to use it. However, an original letter from you is more powerful. If you have a moment for even one original sentence, please delete the form letter and write one of your own. If you do write one of your own PLEASE DRAFT IT IN YOUR WORD PROCESSOR and then paste it into the window below. A rare glitch with our web site has twice deleted letters that were drafted on this page--so it is safer to draft it elsewhere and save a copy. Also, if you draft in a word processor, you will be able to spell check it-- something that our web page cannot do. Thank you very much.
Message:*	I am writing to urge you to end Three Wishes' line of "nurse" lingerie and to refrain from the use of nurses in your future lingerie designs. "Nurse" lingerie sets nurses up as available sex objects, rather than competent professionals, and it is damaging to the nursing profession. I realize this lingerie line is intended as a fantasy, but nursing is not just any profession, but one which is struggling to overcome decades of harmful misconceptions. Perhaps you are not aware that we are in the midst of a global nursing shortage of previously unseen proportions that is only expected to worsen over the next two decades. The nursing shortage is one of our most urgent public health crises. Depicting North America's 3 million registered nurses as female sex objects suggests that nursing work consists primarily of satisfying the sexual needs of physicians and/or patients. Such images discourage men and self-respecting, talented women from entering the profession. This adds to the chronic underfunding of nursing research, education and clinical practice since it is seen as a profession which is all about sexual servitude/pleasure/pain instead of education and hard work. Nursing is a distinct science and an autonomous profession. Registered nurses receive 2-10 years of college-level training, and studies have shown that patients' lives depend directly on the availability and qualifications of the nurses who care for them. For instance, one recent study of nurse short-staffing--a primary cause and effect of the shortage--found that when the patient load of a nurse is doubled from 4 to 8, post-operative mortality increases by 31%. In essence, nurses save and improve lives every day. As patients, the less nursing care we have, the more likely we are to die. The nursing shortage affects us all. Many who display negative images of nurses doubt that such images can really harm the nursing profession. However, as public health professionals at USC's Hollywood, Health and Society project and elsewhere can tell you, entertainment media do affect how people think and act with regard to health issues. A 2000 JWT Communications study found that US youngsters in grades 2-10 got their most striking impression of nursing from the fictional television show "ER," and consistent with that show's physician-centric messages, the youngsters found nursing to be a technical field "like shop," a job reserved for "girls" and one too lowly for private school students. Nursing is none of these things. A Kaiser Family Foundation study found that "ER"'s message is so influential that one-third of their viewers use information from the show to make health care decisions. A key reason that nursing is in its current state--understaffed, underfunded and underempowered--is that the work of nurses is undervalued by the general public and health care decision makers, all of whom are consumers of media and advertising. Please be part of the solution to the nursing shortage and the improvement of public health. Help us improve public understanding of nursing at this critical time.
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