Open letter to Bob Wright, NBC Chair and CEO
Mr. Bob
Wright
NBC Chairman and Chief Executive Officer
30 Rockefeller Plaza
New York, NY 10112
nbcshows@nbc.com
Ms. Lisa de Cazotte
Executive Producer
Passions
30 Rockefeller Plaza
New York, NY 10112
Passions@nbc.com
September 15, 2003
Dear Mr. Wright and Ms. de Cazotte:
I am the Executive Director of the Center for Nursing Advocacy, and I am writing to express grave concern about "Nurse Precious," the feisty orangutan who delivers "care" to the character Mrs. Wallace on NBC's daytime serial "Passions."
I understand that the show involves supernatural and surreal events, and that "Nurse Precious" is intended more to entertain than enlighten, but this is still an enormously offensive portrayal of nursing. It reflects actual stereotypes that have long held the profession back and have contributed to the current nursing shortage, which is a major public health crisis. It is also hard to miss the contrast with "Passions"' "beautiful yet complicated" "Dr. Eve Russell," the physician who "enjoys a successful career as a doctor."
Just in case there actually was any confusion, monkeys cannot be nurses. Professional nurses receive between one year (LPN's) and 10 years (RN, PhD's) of college level education, with at least two years required to be an RN. Nursing is an autonomous profession whose defining tenets are constant patient assessment, scientific decisions and interventions. Nurses save or improve millions of lives every day. Nursing operates on the forefront of health care research, clinical practice and education. We are not aware of any monkeys who can fill such roles.
Today, we are in the midst of a global nursing shortage that has been responsible for the deaths of thousands of people. The shortage is predicted to drastically worsen over the next 20 years, which will only worsen patient mortality rates. Scientific research conducted by non-monkey nurse scholars and published in the Journal of the American Medical Association has shown that when nurses have twice the patient load that they should--8 patients instead of 4--their patients are 31% more likely to die within a month.
The media's portrayal of nurses greatly impacts nursing recruitment. Focus group studies done in 2000 by JWT Specialized Communications found that 1,800 school children (grades 2-10) studied got their strongest visualization of nursing from your network's ostensibly realistic series "ER," whose depiction of nursing is itself inaccurate and inadequate. The students' perceptions of "ER"'s one major nurse character were oriented toward her romantic life, not her professional life. And when the work of nurses is portrayed (even jokingly) as so menial that it can be performed by monkeys, it makes the recruitment of the best and brightest--or any self-respecting person--even harder.
I strongly urge you to retire "Nurse Precious" from your show immediately. In addition, I believe that you owe a debt to the nursing profession for the six months in which you have shown "nursing" being performed by a monkey. To make amends, I suggest that, in consultation with a real nurse advisor, you replace Precious with a qualified human nurse, and make that nurse a compelling three-dimensional figure whose work is important, rather than an unskilled laborer, sex object or handmaiden to physicians. Perhaps the new nurse could be a Latino or African-American male nurse, which could encourage others from those groups to enter the profession, in which they remain underrepresented. Talented people on our staff would be happy to assist you in developing such plot ideas.
You could also make amends by donating to a nursing image campaign. Our Center does such work, as does Nurses for a Healthier Tomorrow. We are both non-profits.
Please call or email me at your earliest convenience to discuss how we might repair the damage that has been done. If I don't hear from you by September 30, I will phone you.
Thank you.
Sandy Summers, MSN, MPH, RN
Executive Director
The Center for Nursing Advocacy
203 Churchwardens Rd.
Baltimore, MD 21212-2937
410-323-1100
ssummers@truthaboutnursing.org
www.truthaboutnursing.org