|
|
 |
News on Nursing in the Media
Take Action!
December 4, 2013 - Tonight's episode of the popular ABC sitcom Modern Family revealed that Dylan, the sometime boyfriend of character Haley Dunphy, was attending nursing school. That's great, right? Sweet, attractive Dylan, a straight guy who won't reinforce the stereotype that men in nursing are all gay! Except, umm...Dylan is clueless. 
Actually, he's always been more or less an idiot, and a good match for the superficial Haley. Dylan's reveal about nursing school came at a football game where he also showed Haley some graffiti he'd once written for her on the stands--"HALEY DUNPHY DOME." Dylan said he'd meant that to read "do me," but he'd always had "problems with spacing." Dylan, a musician, also explained that the transition to nursing made sense because whereas he'd once healed with music, he'd now be "doing the same thing with drugs." That's cute, but on the whole, Dylan's pursuit of nursing reinforces the stereotype that any well-meaning dimwit can become a nurse. We would be fine with Dylan suddenly becoming a non-idiot, but assuming that show producers have any interest in continuity--Dylan has been this way since the 2009 series premiere--it seems best for Modern Family to quickly phase out his nursing career, ideally with some plotline emphasizing that (who knew?!) nurses actually have to be intelligent, savvy people with an education. See the film clips or go straight to the petition!
Take Action!
August 5, 2013 -- Today's double episode of Disney XD's tween series Lab Rats included a brief but powerful attack on nurse practitioners. The live-action show, which is kind of a sci-fi / action sitcom, focuses on a trio of bionic teens who live incognito with their brilliant inventor father and, you know, fight evil. In this episode, the father's exiled brother and former business partner returns to take revenge and use the teens for nefarious ends. At one point, the father mocks his brother by noting that he has turned into "Dr. Evil...or should I say Nurse Practitioner Evil, since you flunked out of med school!" The brother admits that he was "dismissed" from school for "screaming too loud when I saw the needles." Of course, it's absurd to suggest that failing medical school qualifies you to be a nurse practitioner--despite not being able to handle needles, no less. But the insult will register clearly with the 9-14 year-old males who make up the show's main audience; they will likely absorb the basic message that NPs are losers who can't hack medical school. It's actually a mark of progress that NPs are now well-established enough in U.S. culture that the show creators assumed this audience would get the reference. But it's not surprising that the content of the reference is consistent with the wannabe physician stereotype and the baseless anti-NP messages sent by physician groups and too much of the mainstream media in recent years. In fact, a great deal of research shows that NPs provide care that is at least as good as physicians. NPs are nurses with graduate degrees in nursing who, as a class, have no desire to be physicians. But NPs can and do play a critical role in delivering high-quality, cost-effective care in these difficult times. more...see the film clips or go straight to our petition--please tell Disney and the show creators not to be evil!
Nurse X confronts a cutting-edge technique
December 14, 2013 -- Today the Irish Examiner ran a report by Kevin Keane that featured a remarkable piece of patient advocacy by an unnamed nurse: snatching a scalpel from a physician's hand as he was about to "cut into an elderly patient's vein in order to take a blood sample." The piece describes evidence presented at a recent "medical council inquiry" into allegedly poor care by the physician in 2009 at Midland Regional Hospital, Portlaoise. The nurse, identified only as Nurse X, had apparently asked the physician to insert and draw the blood from a tube. After she took the scalpel away, he reportedly "mumbled something under his breath and had a blank look on his face." Although it may not have taken a lot of health care knowledge to see that this method of drawing blood was a danger to the patient, it did take courage to take a scalpel away from him, particularly in a setting in which nurses apparently are not permitted to draw their own blood samples. The report includes some additional comments from Nurse X to the effect that the physician "just hadn't a clue how to treat a patient," as well as information from a senior physician along the same lines. The scalpel anecdote is brief, but it's a great illustration of the role that direct care nurses can and should play in protecting patients from any threat. We thank Mr. Keane and the Irish Examiner. more...
Kickball and tummy aches:
The 2012 Truth About Nursing Awards for Best and Worst Media Depictions
2013 -- The Truth About Nursing announces our 10th annual list of the best and worst media portrayals of nurses! The year 2012 featured the popular BBC/PBS series Call the Midwife, which showed skilled and autonomous nurses caring for the poor in 1950's London, as well as valuable new seasons from Showtime's Nurse Jackie and Channel 4's documentary series 24 Hours in A&E in the U.K.Mainstream press sources published good items ranging from Tina Rosenberg's excellent New York Times piece about the value of APRN-run clinics, to Julian Guthrie's San Francisco Chronicle profile of UCSF nursing dean David Vlahov, to Ronan McGreevy's Irish Times report about the University College Dublin study of nursing imagery on YouTube, to an Indian Express piece about a recent study on the appalling working conditions that Indian nurses confront.
And many nurses advocated strongly for better public health and for better media about nursing, including Massachusetts nurse Wendie Howland, who monitors the "Help a Reporter Out" website to educate journalists when they seem to assume that only physicians can provide health expertise for their stories. On the other hand, the year also included the usual onslaught of damaging distortions from the media. The U.S. prime time landscape remained dominated by shows with little respect for nursing, including ABC's Grey's Anatomy and Fox's House, each of which featured a slew of strong, expert physician characters providing all meaningful care, while nurses were handmaidens who did little more than fetch things. Fox's new sitcom The Mindy Project focused on quirky but skilled OB-GYN physicians, but also included nurse Morgan Tookers, a goofy ex-convict with little apparent health skill. On The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, in a segment about re-integrating military medics into the civilian workforce, the host insisted that the medics were vastly overqualified to be school nurses and mocked school nurses as being all about "kickball" and "tummy aches." And the "naughty nurse" remained a staple of the entertainment industry, appearing in everything from a Dallas Mavericks Dancers routine to an actual job ad from a Swedish hospital. Despite these problems, we thank those responsible for the best media and encourage others to keep trying. see the full awards...
Take Action!
J&J stops advertising on Scrubbing In, but keeps on advertising on Grey's Anatomy
November 25, 2013 -- Johnson & Johnson has sent the Truth correspondence that they have ceased advertising on "Scrubbing In." We checked episode #5 online and broadcast and have verified that all the J&J ads are gone. We would like to thank J&J for this. But we have asked J&J at least 5 times if they would cease advertising on the far more influential Grey's Anatomy and The Mindy Project shows and Andrea Higham, Director of the Campaign for Nursing's Future, responded "I do not have any control on our brands airing in the other shows – they are dramas and are looked at differently than reality shows featuring real nurses." We asked her who did have control over this advertising so we could follow up with that person and Ms. Higham still hasn't responded. We are keeping our campaign wide open to continue to pressure J&J to stop advertising on all media products that degrade nursing. Will you please join us? Here's the link to our petition. Please circulate to friends and colleagues. Thank you!
Success!
Scrubbing Less See our press release
November 17, 2013 -- Since MTV's 10-episode reality show Scrubbing In premiered last month, tens of thousands of nurses, as well as the Truth and other nursing groups, have worked to persuade MTV to cancel the show or at least reduce the damage it is causing. See our original analysis. After these collective efforts, MTV reached out to The Truth About Nursing to engage in extensive discussions about how to ameliorate the situation. MTV has agreed to take several helpful steps, including airing the show at a less prominent time, some re-editing of episodes, and other efforts to convey accurate information about nursing, although the last six episodes will air. Thank you to those who protested the show's focus on very personal details of the lives of the nurses with little suggestion of nursing skill or knowledge, all of which tends to reinforce nursing stereotypes. Below we explain the five main steps MTV has agreed to take, including a "Day in the Life of a Nurse" MTV website feature. We also ask that you join us in urging Johnson & Johnson and others to stop sponsoring Scrubbing In; despite promises to stop, J&J has continued to place ads for its products on the show up through at least the fourth episode. Please click here to sign the petition to ask J&J to cease its advertising on Scrubbing In and other shows that degrade nursing. Thanks again! more...
July 3, 2013 -- Although the New York Times remains far more likely to consult physicians as health care experts, in recent times the paper has occasionally consulted nurse experts as well. For example, today the paper ran a very long and very helpful "Ask an Expert" column featuring York College nursing professor and advanced practice nurse Julia Bucher (right), who gave practical, sensitive advice to readers caring for relatives with cancer. Bucher addressed difficult topics and advised the often distraught family members asking the questions with a great deal of tact, yet she still managed to provide real support and critical information, with links to additional resources, particularly social workers and nurses. Bucher advocated a team-oriented, problem-solving approach, with a focus on practical options, to help readers cope with tasks and emotions that can seem overwhelming. Sometimes her responses included general questions that readers should consider in evaluating their own situations. And in some cases, the questions were longer than Bucher's responses, as if some of what she was doing was giving questioners a supportive ear (and the ears of Times readers) in airing concerns about which there may be no easy answer. A couple months earlier, on May 1, the Times ran a much shorter "Room for Debate" feature about the ethics of force-feeding inmates on hunger strike at the Guantanamo Bay prison. The paper included Ann Gallagher (right), director of the International Centre for Nursing Ethics at Surrey University and editor of the journal Nursing Ethics, as one of five "debaters." Gallagher's short contribution argued, with restraint and sensitivity, that nurses who decline to force-feed are acting in accord with their ethical obligations as caregivers and that the prisoners have the right, as autonomous individuals, to refuse treatment, including hydration and nutrition. Both Times features allow articulate, diplomatic nursing leaders to give readers a sense of an important aspect of health care--and the nursing that plays a central role in that care. We thank the Times. more...
October 24, 2013 - MTV's new reality show Scrubbing In, which premiered tonight, focuses on nine young travel nurses in California, but it isn't really about nursing. Sure, the show created a firestorm in the nursing community before it even aired because of advance indications that the nurses might come off as twits 'n' sluts. The first episode does suggest that the nurses were not selected to appear because of their nursing experience or ability to convey an accurate and comprehensive picture of the profession. Instead, they seem to have been chosen for their strong personalities, physical appearance, and eagerness to embrace reality show culture. The vast majority of the episode is the nurses' personal interactions, with a focus on partying, romance, and sex (e.g., "I have big fake boobs!" "Did you guys bring your vibrators?"). Well, that's a different vision of Nursing's Future for show sponsor Johnson & Johnson, whose Neutrogena products were advertised during the episode, isn't it? The episode's limited depictions of nursing are pretty awful. At one point, two nurses do a passable job caring for a patient who looks like she is faking a seizure for the camera, but the scene does not exactly inspire confidence in their skills or knowledge. Another time, a nurse who is apparently on duty is shown practicing starting IV's in a way that suggests she has little idea what she's doing. Another nurse spends significant time trying to help her and is later chastised (rightly) by his supervisor for abandoning his unit. Two nurses show up in California without California nursing licenses (apparently those DUIs were creating a delay!). A nurse sits on her bed wearing dirty scrubs, heedless of the potential for bringing deadly organisms into her personal surroundings, as another nurse points out to her--and to viewers. There is virtually no mention here of nursing education, practice specialties, research, or policy leadership. Nurses, like anyone else, should be allowed to discuss and engage in social activity in any lawful way; nurses are not angels and holding them to regressive personal moral standards actually undermines the profession. But associating nursing with frank sexuality does risk reinforcing the naughty nurse image that the average reality show participant does not face. And watching several of the nurses giggle about looking for "hot doctors" calls to mind the related stereotype that nurses are physician golddiggers. On the whole, the show fails to convey that the vast majority of nurses are serious professionals who save and improve lives with their advanced skills. And because the show's focus and structure is personal drama and self-reflection among reality-show twenty-somethings, many viewers may conclude that nurses in general are not especially serious about their work--and that they don't need to be. The show is likely to reinforce ideas that have long undermined nurses' claims to adequate resources for education and clinical practice and that now threaten the health of millions worldwide. We urge MTV to cancel the show, and we hope that at a minimum, the producers will try to give some sense of real nursing skill. read more...and please join our letter-writing campaign!
Innate compassion and learned behavior
May 6, 2013 -- To mark International Nurses Day, the widely-read PARADE magazine today posted on its website 10 portraits drawn from Carolyn Jones's The American Nurse, a coffee table book of portraits published in 2012. On the whole, the portraits and related interview text give a sense of the important, wide-ranging work of nursing. A few even briefly suggest how nurses use their skills to help patients, including an excellent portrait of a New Orleans family nurse practitioner who cares for mothers and babies, and good one in which an Appalachian hospice nurse describes his dream of opening a clinic and addressing the obesity epidemic. The images are diverse; they include two African-Americans, three men, and two advanced practice nurses, as well as nurses who work in a school, a prison, and an aircraft. All interview text includes the professional credentials of the nurses, including graduate degrees. And there is no suggestion that nurses exist to serve physicians. On the other hand, a lot of the text and portraits are infected with emotional "angel" imagery, vague about nursing, or not about nursing at all. Likewise, the introductory statement from Jones--that nurses are a "special breed" combining "innate compassion and learned behavior"--doesn't exactly tell the public anything new or helpful. We also do not learn here that nurses do anything on the cutting edge, or that they are engaged in research or innovation. And although some of the photos are powerful, as past photo collections featuring nurses have shown it's hard for still images to convey the most important thing most people need to learn about nurses--that they are life-saving professionals with advanced skills. We realize that the imagery and text that appears here primarily reflects decisions by Jones, not the nurses. In any case, we thank those responsible for the imagery and text that does advance public understanding of nursing. more...
Take Action!
A pretty nurse is selling poppies from a tray
October 3, 2013 -- Tonight's episode of Fox's Glee included an abysmal depiction of school nursing. In the Beatles-themed episode ("Tina in the Sky with Diamonds"), the McKinley High School principal apparently hired a college student named Penny--who had not yet even begun nursing school--to give vaccinations and other school nursing care. Penny described her work as part of "an internship" that would help her gain admission to nursing school later. Penny was dangerously incompetent; her "care" included mistakenly injecting urine instead of vaccine. And the episode implied that a real nurse would be better. But Penny was still repeatedly identified as "Nurse Penny," and the overall effect was to make a mockery of school nursing. Such media disinformation, even as a "joke," contributes to the undervaluation that has already led to rampant understaffing of school nurses and now takes the lives of students everywhere. Please urge those responsible to make amends!...read more or go straight to our letter-writing campaign!
August 2013 -- Elysium isn't just another dystopian action movie. In this one, unequal access to health care is a central part of the brutal oppression of the 99% by the privileged few, and a skilled nurse character is one of the hero's allies in his mission to subvert the Earth's selfish overlords. South African writer-director Neill Blomkamp presents the planet in 2154 as an overpopulated, overheated mess controlled by bullying androids. Meanwhile, the wealthiest humans reside on a luxurious orbiting ring called Elysium, where "med bay" machines can cure any illness short of death. Yet no one on Earth itself has access to a med bay. Instead, people crowd overburdened hospitals like the Los Angeles facility in which nurse Frey works, apparently in the emergency department, when she is not caring for her leukemia-stricken daughter. After Frey's childhood sweetheart, the combat-ready ex-convict Max, runs afoul of the machinery of the state and seeks Frey's help, she becomes part of a desperate plan to challenge the evil order. The movie's structure owes something to Robocop, The Matrix, and Iron Man, and it's full of bloody violence and multi-level intrigue, plus Jodie Foster speaking French. So there isn't much time for nursing. Still, Frey does handle Max's serious abdominal knife wound on her own, even though she initially tells him that he "need[s] a doctor." We also see in flashbacks that when she and Max were kids, she was the clever, literate one. The film suggests that Frey reports to senior nurses, not physicians. And she is strong enough in trying to protect her daughter, though she also spends a lot of the film's second half needing to be rescued, and her character could have been further developed. But many of the human characters are somewhat underdone or overdone; the androids get most of the best lines. In any case, the striking and often compelling movie shows a nurse as someone with real health care ability and aligns nursing with those seeking a more just world. more...
September 2013 -- The fall TV landscape has plenty of physician-centric health shows, but nurses are in the mix. Sure, ABC's popular Grey's Anatomy (premiering Sept. 26) will be back for its 500th season with a dozen brilliant, sexy surgeons and some almost-invisible handmaiden nurses. Mindy Kaling's Fox sitcom The Mindy Project (Sept. 17) will return for a second season with three quirky but skilled OB-GYNs and three demented and/or nasty minor nurse characters. The CW's Hart of Dixie (Oct. 7), about a young New York physician in a small Southern town, will be back. And the cable arts network Ovation will offer A Young Doctor's Notebook (Oct. 2), a "darkly humorous" new series about the travails of a young physician at a remote hospital during the Russian Revolution. But ABC's Private Practice and Body of Proof are gone, and all four of the godlike-physician hospital dramas that premiered on other networks last year failed (Do No Harm (NBC), The Mob Doctor (Fox), Emily Owens, MD (CW), and Monday Mornings (TNT)). CBS will offer the thriller-drama Hostages (Sept. 23), in which a rogue FBI agent kidnaps the family of a surgeon who has been chosen to operate on the President and demands that she kill the chief executive in surgery. An equally plausible new tween sitcom called Mighty Med, about the "superhero" wing of a local hospital, will appear on Disney XD (Oct. 7); it's not clear yet whether superheroes need physicians or nurses. Other shows will clearly have nurses. MTV has a new reality show called Nurse Nation (now called Scrubbing In) that "follows nine twenty-something travel nurses all assigned to work at a new hospital in a brand new city for 13 weeks." NBC's Parks & Recreation (Sept. 26), the local government sitcom with respected nurse and public health official Ann Perkins, returns. Ricky Gervais's new Channel 4 "comedy-drama" Derek, available in the U.S. on Netflix (Sept. 12), focuses on the "quirky" staff and residents at a nursing home, whose director Hannah is sometimes described as a nurse. Channel 4's documentary 24 Hours in A&E has just finished its third season in the U.K., with skilled nurses among its cast, but only the first season has aired in the U.S., on BBC America. Also in the U.K., ITV Studios is filming a new drama called Breathless (early 2014) "about a group of doctors and nurses working in a London hospital in the 1960s, a world in which everything and everyone has their place." In spring 2014, Showtime's powerful Nurse Jackie will return for a sixth season of clinical expertise, creative patient advocacy, and perhaps more unfortunate suggestions that nurses report to physicians. And returning for a third season on PBS will be the BBC drama Call the Midwife, which focuses on eight (!) skilled, autonomous nurse midwives caring for poor women in 1950's London. So on balance, the new season could sound worse for nursing. Join us in tracking it! See the full review of the upcoming television season!
Want a historical look? See our fall TV previews from:
| 2012 | 2011 | 2010 | 2009 | 2008 |
| 2007 | 2006 | 2005 | 2004 | 2003 |
August 2013 -- In recent months ConAgra Foods has been running video ads for its "jerky snack" Slim Jim that feature a self-identified "murse" distributing the product in a hospital waiting room to men suffering from different forms of "male spice loss." That malady is the subject of a broader ad campaign ostensibly aimed at helping men who have chosen to forego accepted macho pursuits in favor of weird, vaguely feminine activities like yoga and matching outfits. That is, the ad campaign is aimed at selling jerky to young males who might actually fear such an absence of traditional maleness. For nursing, the ad is surprisingly complex. The term "murse," used at least as early as 2003 on the sitcom Scrubs, is basically a cute contraction of "male nurse." And like that term, it may imply that men in nursing are not simply "nurses," but something else, questionable both as nurses and as men. On the other hand, we know that some men in nursing don't object to "murse" and may even use it themselves. Anyway, the Slim Jim nurse in this ad is not exactly displaying great health care expertise. And when he notes that "it's my job to distribute Slim Jims to patients suffering from male spice loss," there may be an implication that he's just doing what someone else told him to. But on the whole, the ad is laughing with the nurse, not at him. He projects traditional masculinity, with his authoritative voice and military fatigue pants. And he says and does things viewers are supposed to be amused by, mocking the "patients" by publicly labeling them (e.g., "tantric yoga guy") and throwing their prescribed snacks to them (naturally, they can't catch). The nurse also uses relatively large, clinical-sounding words, suggesting some level of education. We wondered if men in nursing were being singled out, but traditionally male health care figures play similar roles in other ads in the company's "spice loss" campaign (see ads featuring physicians and first responders). The idea seems to be simply that men help men be men. And so, despite the "murse" term and the gender-role intolerance in the ad, it may actually be a small step toward normalizing the idea of men in nursing with some of the ad's target audience. We're not suggesting anyone thank ConAgra, but it's food for thought. more...
April 14, 2013 -- With the fifth season of Showtime's Nurse Jackie set to begin tonight, it's time to review the last season, which aired in spring 2012 and once again highlighted the central role nurses play in patient care. Most of the season focused on Jackie's recovery from her drug addiction and other personal issues. But when there were clinical scenes, the show continued to present Jackie, at least, as essentially a peer of the physicians. She was a clinical leader providing creative technical and psychosocial care. And in the last two episodes of the season, she actually took over the emergency department in the midst of a staffing crisis, running it expertly until the malevolent hospital CEO Mike Cruz fired her. The show also featured more credible, compelling interactions among nurses, and between nurses and physicians, showing that nurses are sentient three-dimensional beings. All of that is rare in Hollywood. Jackie's quirky mentee Zoey Barkow continued to show potential as a future version of Jackie--at several points Zoey showed the kind of clinical courage and initiative that Jackie does. There is still no really strong male nurse character, though nurses Thor and Sam do seem to have settled into their roles as competent, funny Jackie acolytes. On the downside, the show continued to struggle to portray nursing autonomy. There were several more suggestions that physicians control nurse staffing, and, after Cruz demoted nurse-manager Gloria Akalitus to staff nurse, the show proceeded without any apparent nurse managers at all. Still, on the whole, Nurse Jackie remains probably the best show for nursing in U.S. primetime television history. The executive producers of the show are Linda Wallem, Liz Brixius, Richie Jackson, and Caryn Mandabach. more...
January 11, 2013 -- Today Minnesota Public Radio (MPR) aired a report by Laura Yuen about sexual abuse of runaway girls that featured St. Paul nurse practitioner Laurel Edinburgh (right), who helped start an intervention program for the girls. And the MPR website also offers a substantial interview with Edinburgh about her work. Broadcast as part of National Public Radio's All Things Considered program, the main report describes efforts by police, prosecutors, advocates, and nurses to address the problem of sexual exploitation of runaway girls, with a focus on the police who search for missing children. The report spends significant time with Edinburgh, explaining that the nurse practitioner "helped create the beginnings" of the Ramsey County Runaway Intervention Program a decade ago, that her research has shown that the program improves outcomes, and that advocates hope the program can serve as a model for the rest of the state. The piece also notes that Edinburgh devised a set of questions that St. Paul police use to screen runaways for signs of physical and sexual abuse. The interview allows Edinburgh to provide more detail about the runaway problem, how the Program started, and how it might be expanded. We thank Laura Yuen and Minnesota Public Radio for this report, which presents Edinburgh as an innovative and expert health care leader. more...
January 11, 2013 -- Today the New York Times ran a front-page story by Abby Goodnough about Martha Keochareon, a retired Massachusetts nurse who, while dying at home of pancreatic cancer, invited students from her nursing alma mater to come study her. The piece focuses more on the drama surrounding Keochareon's death and the real-world experience Keochareon offered the students than it does on the importance of nursing skills. Commendably, the report does quote two nurses with expertise in end-of-life care, one from Holyoke Community College (the alma matter) and another from the American Association of Colleges of Nursing (AACN). But the report fails to specifically identify either one as a nurse. The piece does offer readers a basic sense of what nurses do and how they are educated, with references to college courses and clinical training. In particular, the article briefly highlights how nurses are educated in palliative care, describing an AACN program designed to do that. And the piece refers to the challenges nurses may face in providing adequate pain relief to those who are dying. In fact, even conveying that nurses are educated in colleges at all can seem like an achievement for the elite media, particularly in view of the handmaiden vision that still prevails in many Hollywood products. We thank Abby Goodnough and the New York Times for this prominent and generally helpful story. more...
Come with me if you want to live
June 3, 2013 -- Today, during a speech about mental health awareness, U.S. Vice President Joe Biden spent about a minute paying tribute to nurses. That short part of his speech implicated issues including nursing skills, nursing autonomy, the nurse as angel, the profession's gender mix, and even the naughty nurse. Biden mentioned psychiatric nurses, and then, apparently departing from his prepared text, said that "if there's any angels in heaven, by the way, they're all nurses," referring to his personal experience with neurosurgery. Of course, nurses are not angels, but real professionals who save lives with education and skill--and unlike angels, they need the resources to do so. Then, in the remark that's gotten the most attention, Biden said: "Doctors allow you to live, nurses make you want to live." Well, sort of. If he meant nurses focus on psychosocial care, motivating you to keep trying and showing you how, that's good, although he might have simply meant nurses are nice people who cheer you up. Unfortunately, the remark implies that physicians save lives and nurses don't save lives, which is false. And as titters from the audience alerted Biden, the statement can also be interpreted, though not fairly, as a clichéd reference to hot female nurses making sick men want to live for reasons that we can't specify here or our news alert will bounce back. Biden quickly noted that he was referring to "male nurses and female nurses." Finally, Biden said that during the two months he spent in the ICU, his neurosurgeon would enter his room and say (here Biden adopted a deep, somewhat pompous voice): "We gotta do this, this, this, and the other," and "my nurses would all go, 'yes, sir,' and then they'd do exactly what I needed." We appreciate Biden's suggestion that the nurses had the knowledge and skill to do "exactly what [he] needed." It's sad but plausible that the nurses felt they had to do it covertly, as Biden implies, presumably because they lacked the social power to simply discuss care with the surgeon as a professional colleague. We thank Vice President Biden for presenting some helpful information about nursing. more ... and see the video clip!
The weather in my head
The most common way people give up their power
is by thinking they don't have any.Alice Walker
March 16, 2013 -- This month major press entities ran pieces addressing the ongoing problem of conflicts between nurses and physicians in clinical settings. On March 4, The Washington Post published a long article by Sandra G. Boodman about the growing use of anger management programs to deal with "out-of-control doctors" in hospital environments that are increasingly team-oriented and less tolerant of abuse and tantrums. The piece is good as far as it goes, conveying lots of helpful information about why the abuse happens, programs to address it, and how it can affect patient care. But the focus is overwhelmingly on the perspectives of the physicians themselves, with only one nurse consulted briefly, and there is no real effort to explore what the actual victims of the abuse think or experience. Instead, readers get a long section in which an abusive surgeon provides a slew of reasons/excuses for her conduct, mainly how much she herself suffered in her brutal training. And today, Theresa Brown, RN, posted a well-written blog entry on the New York Times site about the choices nurses face when they disagree with a physician's care plan. Brown briefly discusses how nurses can protect patients in a world in which the nurses have less practical power than physicians--and in Brown's view, a world in which nurses fall below physicians in a "legal, established hierarchy" that must be obeyed. But in fact, nurses do not report to physicians. The two groups practice distinct professions. In hospital settings, they have separate management structures. And nurses are legally and ethically bound not to accede to physician wishes that threaten patients. Of course, Brown is right that nurses who stand up to physicians face risks; they range from bullying to assaults to being fired by nurse managers who fear the physicians' power as revenue generators. But there is no formal "hierarchy" between the professions, just different scopes of practice and a longstanding power disparity. Brown seems to argue that physicians should have final authority over all clinical decisions, possibly because of a view that one type of health professional has to be in charge of everything, an idea that is regressive and untenable in the highly diverse, patient-focused modern health care environment. Brown recommends interprofessional education programs, and we agree that they improve relations between the professions. But simply trying to persuade physicians not to abuse their power, while meekly embracing a subservient professional status, is not enough to protect patients--or nurses. Nurses need collaboration and autonomy. more...
Truth's hoop dreams come true!
Dallas Mavericks Dancers get over their bad case of loving nurses
March 2013 -- This month the Truth learned that the Dancers for the former NBA champion Dallas Mavericks had decided to stop entertaining fans by dressing in naughty nurse outfits and doing a sexually-oriented dance to the tune of Robert Palmer's "Bad Case of Loving You." The Dancers were doing that in early 2012, and the Truth launched a letter-writing campaign that led to over 200 letters. We explained that the naughty nurse stereotype impedes recruitment of the best and the brightest into the profession (particularly men) and undermines nurses' claims to adequate resources for clinical practice, education, research and residencies. After some time, the manager of the Dancers called us to report that they have ceased using naughty nurse imagery due to our campaign! We thank the Dancers for heeding our request, and we thank our supporters for educating those who degrade nursing. Thank you!
Hooters's naughty nurse fever now in remission
March 2013 -- Two years ago, the popular restaurant chain Hooters declared March 17 "National Hooky Day," in honor of the start of the U.S. men's college basketball tournament. The company's website and TV ads featured naughty nurse "Ashleigh," who wanted to send you a "Doctor's Note" so you could take the day off work to recover from "Basketball Fever" and enjoy a free appetizer. The Truth launched a campaign that resulted in several hundred letters of protest to Hooters, but the company continue airing the commercials in 2011 and 2012. We continued lobbying by phone and this year, the company did not use "Nurse Ashleigh" to promote basketball coupons for Hooters. Instead, Hooters went back to its standard ads, featuring scantily attired women who were not dressed in nurse outfits. We thank all who helped teach Hooters that selling its products by embracing the naughty nurse stereotype undermines nursing. Thank you!
Possible success--jury's still out!
American Family Care clinics--You get to see a physician, not a nurse!
May 31, 2013 -- Truth About Nursing supporters recently told us about a television commercial being aired in the southern United States by American Family Care, an aggressively expanding chain of urgent care clinics that plans to have more than 140 locations in 26 states by the end of this year. The ad featured two people texting back and forth about where to seek health care. At the end, one texter recommended that the other go to American Family Care because there you get to see "a doctor, not a nurse." We could not locate the commercial (we created the image above based on what people told us the ad was like), but American Family Care itself was not hard to find. We placed about 7 calls, 1 per day, to Felicia Fortune, the corporation's director of marketing. She never returned any calls. Then we placed a call to company CEO Bruce Irwin and left a detailed message. American Family Care's chief medical officer Glenn Harnett returned our call and had a long discussion with Truth executive director Sandy Summers--you can listen to a recap of that phone call here in an mp3 (9 min). Harnett insisted that the care provided by physicians was better than that provided by APRNs based on the length of physicians' formal education. However, APRNS typically get as much formal health science education--4 years--as physicians do, and in any case a mountain of research in recent decades has shown that if either of the two professions has better patient outcomes, it's nurses. Harnett was not interested in the research, despite the strong and increasing emphasis on evidence-based practice in modern health care. He did, however, tell Sandy that American Family Care would pull the ad. We thanked him. Harnett said the company would replace it with an ad that went something like this: "At American Family Care, we care about you. That's why when you come to our clinics, you get to see a physician." We told him that isn't much better, since it implies that the people you're not seeing--which in the quick clinic context would only be APRNs--are inferior to the ones you are seeing. Sadly, Harnett did not see our point. And he refused to let us help the company create an ad that was not offensive or to send us a link to the new ad once it was done. By the way, we see that the company's "staff openings" section currently lists four (4) Family Nurse Practitioner positions in Alabama--we certainly hope the company "cares about" its Alabama customers as much as the others! Anyway, if you see a new version of the company's ad or related marketing efforts, please send us a copy or write to us at info@truthaboutnursing.org. Thanks very much!!
January 27, 2013 -- The demise of Lady Sybil in the episode of Downtown Abbey broadcast on PBS tonight in the United States marked the sad end of one of the popular U.K. show's two nurse characters. It's true that the show's third season has really featured no nursing from the independent, idealistic young Sybil or from her senior nursing colleague Isobel Crawley, the crusading (and at times grating) mother of Downton heir Matthew. But in the first two seasons, which followed the Downton household through the First World War, creator Julian Fellowes and the other producers did offer a few notable glimpses of British nursing of the era. These ranged from portrayals of Isobel as a formidable health system organizer with clinical knowledge that in some ways rivaled that of the local physician, on the one hand, to some unfortunate suggestions that nursing amounted to unskilled tending that could be done by any of the Downton females. The show has at least managed to present nursing as an early outside-the-home career option for strong, idealistic women who sought to contribute more broadly to their war-torn societies--and as a harbinger of a more egalitarian world in which women would enjoy more control over their own destinies. It's too bad that, in popular media depictions about our own era, when women can become physicians, we are far less likely to see strong, able female characters choose nursing. more...
January 22, 2013 -- Several recent episodes of ABC's Private Practice, including tonight's series finale, had a few scenes with strong, smart, articulate labor and delivery nurse Stephanie Kemp. And actress Justina Machado, who seems to have made nurse TV characters a career specialty, brought her usual dignity and likability to the role. We appreciate this rare effort by show creator Shonda Rhimes and the other producers to suggest that nurses are not necessarily idiots and that they can be skilled members of the health care team. However, it could also be argued that the Stephanie character was a last-minute Band-Aid on the gaping wound caused by the show's overall portrayal of nursing during its six-year run. Stephanie's skills appeared to consist almost entirely of anticipating physician needs and acting as an assistant to physicians; she displayed little autonomy and rarely interacted with patients. In this sense, she was not unlike the show's now-deceased Dell Parker character, a nurse midwife who often functioned more as an office manager or receptionist than a health professional. At the same time, the other nurses in these recent episodes were even more extreme versions of the show's usual handmaidens, coming off as clueless and/or terrified mice, meekly obeying physician commands and performing the kind of "wallpaper nurse" tasks seen on Hollywood shows like Grey's Anatomy, House, and ER for decades. By contrast, Stephanie was even worthy of a relationship with hunky heart surgeon Sam Bennett. But that romance followed the same trajectory as nurse-physician relationships on show creator Shonda Rhimes's earlier show Grey's Anatomy. For example, in 2008, Grey's surgeon Derek Shepherd's relationship with nurse Rose ended when he returned to surgeon Meredith Grey, and in 2011, Grey's nurse Eli's relationship with surgeon Miranda Bailey ended with her returning to an ex-flame anesthesiologist (who has since become a surgeon; on Grey's, even non-surgeon physicians are unworthy!). Here, Sam ultimately left Stephanie to return to his ex-wife Naomi, a physician fertility specialist. It seems that a few unusually skilled and feisty nurses deserve some basic respect. But let's not get carried away. On Private Practice, it's a physician's world, and the nurses just live in it. see the full review and film clips from relevant episodes...
January 6, 2013 – Today the Richmond (VA) CBS television affiliate WTVR (Channel 6) ran a short segment in which CVS Minute Clinic nurse practitioner Anne Pohnert debunked common myths about the flu in a friendly exchange with one of the channel's news anchors. The channel conveyed respect for Pohnert as a health expert, identifying her as a nurse practitioner. And Pohnert came off as professional and articulate, explaining in a direct, clear way that you can't get the flu from the flu shot, that there are no serious side effects from the shot, that it's important to get the vaccine every year, and that it's not too late to get the shot this year, particularly since the early incidence of flu suggests it will be a bad year for the disease. The short text matching the online video adds a fifth myth, namely that "natural immunity or living a healthy lifestyle is better than getting immunity from the flu shot"; we assume there was no time to discuss that one on the air. (Speaking of living a healthy lifestyle, recall that the Heart Attack Grill's first spokesman died of the flu at age 29. He weighed 575 pounds.) Pohnert's appearance is remarkable not just because it represents an appearance by a nurse as a health expert on broadcast television--still a rarity even on local affiliates--but because the station makes a point of mentioning that Pohnert practices at CVS Minute Clinics. In the early days of quick clinics, the major players almost seemed to apologize for staffing their clinics with NPs. But the explicit references to CVS here suggest that the company may now actually be promoting its clinics through the expertise of their nurse practitioners, at least in this case. We commend WTVR for this segment. more...
January 2013 -- Much of the reporting about U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's recent hospitalization ignored the role nurses surely had in her care and suggested that physicians alone monitored and assessed her condition, tasks in which nursing is in fact critical. For example, an Associated Press report posted on December 31 on Businessweek's website and elsewhere didn't just note that physicians had "discovered" the clot, which is fair, but also said (relying on a statement by Clinton's spokesman) that "doctors" would "monitor" her medication, "continue to assess her condition," and "determine if any further action is required," evidently all by themselves. Nurses were not mentioned, even though they provide the majority of skilled care to hospitalized patients, particularly the skilled 24/7 monitoring and intervention that often means the difference between life and death (granted, providing good nursing care can be challenging in the case of celebrities, who tend to be swarmed by physicians). Many press accounts, when not directly crediting physicians for Clinton's care, adopted passive language in describing it, thereby further suggesting that physicians alone were responsible and further masking the role nurses actually played. Thus, the AP story stated that Clinton was "under observation" and "was being treated with anti-coagulants." This passive voice hides the fact that nurses would be the ones giving her those drugs and carefully monitoring their effects. And as far as we could see, the press consulted only physicians for expert comment--in the AP story that meant neurologists at Georgetown and Duke--when critical care nurses could also provide valuable input on the care and experiences of patients with blood clots. Of course, physicians play a critical role in caring for these patients and the news media should consult them. But the media's failure to tell the public about the critical roles that nurses also play reinforces the damaging misimpression that physicians provide all the health care that matters. The AP article was written by Matthew Lee with AP Chief Medical Writer Marilynn Marchione. more...
December 21, 2012 -- Recent obituaries for two extraordinary nursing leaders show how far nursing has come in the last half-century and, to some extent, how far it has yet to go. On June 9, the Baltimore Sun published Frederick Rasmussen's long, generally good obituary for Elizabeth Scanlan Trump, the co-founder and longtime nursing director of the University of Maryland's Shock Trauma Center, arguably the finest trauma center in the world. The piece portrays Scanlan Trump as "the first trauma nurse" and as the driven "full partner" of the pioneering trauma surgeon R Adams Cowley. Cowley is generally given sole credit for founding the Trauma Center. The piece has good quotes from the Trauma Center's current heads of nursing and medicine, as well as from Cowley's widow. They make clear that Scanlan Trump was a remarkable nurse who fought to establish the Trauma Center and to improve nursing education, though we could have used more detail on that and Trump's role as a nurse manager. The obituary also has a couple bits of handmaiden imagery that are especially unfortunate for a piece about someone so fierce. We noticed that the Trauma Center bears Cowley's name alone, though the obituary suggests that Scanlan Trump effectively co-founded it. We reached out to the chief nursing officer of the University of Maryland Medical Center and the Vice President of Nursing of the Shock Trauma Center and suggested that the hospital consider adding Scanlan-Trump's name. In a cordial meeting, CNO Lisa Rowen, RN, DNSc, and Shock Trauma VP of Nursing and Operations Karen Doyle, RN, MS, MBA, persuaded us that Scanlan-Trump's contributions, though great, did not merit that recognition in terms of trauma care innovation. However, the nursing leaders did agree to take other permanent steps to highlight Scanlan Trump's contributions to nursing, including naming one of the conference rooms in Shock Trauma's new trauma tower after her. And today, the New York Times ran a shorter but very good obituary by Daniel Slotnick for Vernice Ferguson. She "fought for greater opportunities, higher wages and more respect for nurses as a longtime chief nursing officer" of what became the U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs (VA), supervising more than 60,000 nurses. When Ferguson left in 1992, after 12 years, the number of VA nurses with at least a bachelor's degree had more than doubled. Ferguson's nursing career required a bit of drive as well. When the African-American graduated from the nursing program at New York University in 1950 with an academic prize, the director of nursing reportedly refused to shake her hand. The piece has several telling quotes from Ferguson, and it effectively conveys the male-physician-dominated environment that Ferguson worked hard to change. The item also notes that Ferguson conducted and supervised nursing research, including at the National Institutes of Health; we could have used more detail on those aspects of her career. But on the whole, both obituaries are powerful reminders that nurses can better their profession--and the world. more...
December 4, 2012 -- Mindy Kaling's new Fox sitcom The Mindy Project, which is set at a small obstetrics practice in New York City, is bad for nursing. Kaling's lookin'-for-love OB-GYN character and the other physicians alone provide skilled care -- by coincidence, Kaling's late mother was an OB-GYN -- while the one minor nurse character Morgan Tookers is a goofy ex-convict. Well-intentioned but ignorant, very odd, and a little scary, Morgan doesn't show much health expertise, and he seems to be based mostly on The Janitor from Scrubs. But wait -- tonight's episode, written by Kaling, also includes a grossly inaccurate attack on midwives! In the main plotline, a holistic midwifery practice led by two New Agey men is "stealing" patients from the traditional OB-GYN practice that Mindy and her two male physician colleagues run. Mindy gets the patients back by telling them that midwives have no significant health training or skill and that only physicians can provide real health care to pregnant women, lies the show presents as hard but inescapable truths. The show's physician characters also caricature the midwives as seductive "charlatans" and "quacks" who are hostile to all "Western medicine," including drugs and vaccines. These seem to be lay midwives, but viewers are likely to apply the show's powerful messages to all midwives (it's not clear if Kaling actually knows that many midwives are nurses with graduate degrees). In fairness, the lead midwife in the episode is a strong, clever character who notes that midwifery predates obstetrics. And we realize that the show mocks everyone for one thing or another; Mindy and her physician colleagues are a bit self-involved and socially maladroit. But the episode never offers any serious criticism of physicians as health providers. And this episode is consistent with the economic and territorial fear some physicians seem to have for advanced practice nurses. The episode may also reflect a reactionary sense that traditional professional and educational hierarchies are under threat. And it is telling that Kaling targets male midwives, even though the vast majority of real midwives are female. Of course, showing that reality might have complicated her gender goals, which involve getting her character the respect of her male physician colleagues. And speaking of reality, in the real world all midwives receive years of health care training. And research shows that the care of certified nurse midwives is at least as good as that of physicians overall. We urge the show to avoid further attacks on nursing and midwifery. more... see the film clips and please join our letter-writing campaign by clicking here!
November 3, 2012 -- Two recent U.S. television news pieces highlight nurses' skilled and autonomous care for patients in crisis. On June 22, PBS aired a 13-minute segment as part of its "Need to Know" series called "Nursing the Wounded." William Brangham's piece profiles three nurses at the large Veteran Administration hospital in San Diego. Each profile highlights a different facet of nurses' expert care for veterans who have returned with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and other problems. Each nurse comes off as articulate and authoritative; the profile of nurse scientist Jill Bormann, who is investigating the use of mantra therapy to manage PTSD, is especially impressive. And two of the three nurses are men, underlining the gender diversity of the profession. Unfortunately, the piece's suggestion that Bormann and the other nurses who are providing holistic, self-directed care to outpatients are playing "new roles" seems to reflect the erroneous view that nursing has traditionally just been about custodial bedside care until just yesterday. And tonight, the ABC current affairs show 20/20 included an 8-minute segment about New York University neonatal intensive care nurses who transported their fragile patients to safety after power failed at their flooded hospital during Hurricane Sandy. The segment, part of a feature about dramatic rescues during the storm entitled "The Heroes Among Us," appears to be the work of producers Gail Deutsch, Marc Dorian, and Adam Sechrist. The report consists mainly of co-host Elizabeth Vargas interviewing seven of the NICU nurses. The piece does include some references to the nurses' knowledge and skill, and it never suggests that physicians were directing their work or their actions to save the babies. On the other hand, the nurses are arguably treated more like bystanders who stepped up in a tragedy rather than highly trained health professionals, and there is a strong focus on the emotional state of the all-female group, an approach the show is unlikely to have taken with physicians. So the ABC segment is not nearly as helpful in conveying the nature and value of what nurses do in their everyday work as the PBS piece is. Still, both segments give prime time television audiences an unusual look at nurses acting autonomously to save and improve lives. more...
One Day in the Life of the Uninsured
November 2012 –The new documentary The Waiting Room follows patients and staff in the overcrowded emergency room at Highland Hospital, which serves the poor and working class of Oakland, California. Working with footage shot over just 24 hours, director Peter Nicks takes a good look at how the United States cares for its underinsured residents. The result is a quiet but compelling indictment of our dysfunctional health financing system. We see Highland's staff try, with skill and patience, to help emergency patients with ailments from gunshot wounds to chronic back pain, although what many of them really need is good primary care. The patients are resilient, but most have to wait a long time, and they are often frustrated, even agitated. Some just seem lost. The film gives physicians more attention than other care givers. And there are only a few glimpses of direct care nurses, even though emergency departments typically have as many nurses as physicians. Five of the eight health workers identified on the film's website are physicians. There is also one social worker, one nursing assistant, and one registered nurse. She is a charge nurse who appears in several scenes, always at her computer, expertly managing a long list of patients, determining who can be moved and when, who can be discharged and when. Sadly, the film never identifies her as a nurse, so viewers may not realize she is one. Yet some may well see the nursing assistant as a nurse. She manages patients in the waiting room itself, taking vital signs, collecting and dispensing information, and displaying diverse interpersonal skills. Of course, these are just guesses about how viewers will see the providers; some theaters showing the film call this charismatic nurse's aide a "feisty head receptionist." In any case, she and one of the resident physicians form the moral core of the movie. For most viewers, the vision of nursing that emerges from this odd mix of likely misimpressions will probably be fairly good, but not great. The film's overall merit is clearer. As millions of people are still "waiting" for a more inclusive and effective health care system, everyone with a stake in that system--that is, everyone--should see this movie. see the full review ... The Waiting Room opens on Friday, November 30 in Washington DC, Boston, and Sacramento, and in many other places in the coming weeks. See a full list of venues here.
October 24, 2012 -- In recent months a number of commentators have issued pleas for the United States to expand the authority and scope of practice of advanced practice registered nurses (APRNs), which studies show would improve health care and rein in costs, contrary to the claims of some opposing physician groups. Two of these pieces are Tina Rosenberg's excellent article "The Family Doctor, Minus the M.D.", posted today on The New York Times website as part of the paper's "Fixes" series, and physician John Rowe's generally good May 7 post on The Atlantic website, "Why Nurses Need More Authority." Rosenberg's Times piece makes clear that clinics run by nurse practitioners (NPs) provide primary care that is at least as good as physician-run clinics. She cites NP credentials and the research showing how good their care is, and she explains why the nursing practice model is so effective. Rowe's item still betrays some condescension and a mistaken belief that APRNs are suited only for "routine" care and unqualified for more difficult diagnostic and care management tasks. But both items argue forcefully that expanding APRN practice would improve access to care and likely reduce health care costs. Both note that organized medicine opposes these measures, claiming wrongly that APRN care is inferior. And both pieces suggest that the physician groups' opposition appears to be driven more by concerns about lost income and authority than by any well-founded concern for patients. We thank those responsible for these pieces and all who wish to base important health policy decisions on facts rather than fear or bias. more...
Take Action!
You will be required to deal with bruising
October 24, 2012 -- Tonight on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, two former U.S. military medics appeared in a segment about re-integrating veterans into the civilian workforce. We honor the service of these veterans, who appear to have significant experience stabilizing wounded soldiers, following EMT Basic training. But Stewart's repeated insistence that the medics are vastly overqualified to be school nurses is a glaring example of the elite media's ignorance of nursing expertise. Stewart mocked school nurses as being all about "kickball" and "tummy aches," even though he explicitly noted that one school nurse position he found required a bachelor of science in nursing--we guess not all bachelor's degrees are created equal (Stewart's bachelor degree is in psychology). Sadly, the medics themselves seemed to agree that they were qualified to hold registered nurse jobs. But today's school nurses need years of university science training because they manage the health of many hundreds of students who attend with serious conditions including asthma, diabetes, and allergies. Students have died because no registered nurse was available. 
And school nurses play a key public health role, not only educating students about critical health issues like pregnancy and STDs, but also monitoring the student population for disease outbreaks. In 2009, school nurse Mary Pappas in New York City (where the Daily Show is recorded and Stewart's children attend school) set in motion the governmental response to the H1N1 flu outbreak, identifying and managing hundreds of her students' symptoms. She later gave compelling testimony at a federal government flu summit. Plus, she made a little girl's tummy feel all better!The segment's theme reminded us of a vague but troubling comment President Barack Obama made just two days earlier in the October 22 presidential debate that veteran medics who wanted to become nurses had to "start from scratch" so it would be good to "change those certifications." Of course, all students should have a chance to show they merit advanced placement in educational programs, but nursing requirements cannot be simply waved away for people with a few weeks of health training and some field experience, no matter how courageous and heroic. Please ask The Daily Show with Jon Stewart to make amends for the damage caused when it spread this disinformation to its 2.5 million viewers--maybe with a segment about the problems school nurses face caring for the kids of a nation whose elite sees their work as trivial. more . . . please join the letter-writing campaign and see the film clips!
October 14, 2012 -- Today the Indian Express (New Delhi) website ran a good story about a recent study by sociologist Sreelekha Nair (right) of the Centre for Women's Development Studies focusing on the troubling situation of India's nurses. The study reportedly found that nurses continue to confront appalling working conditions including understaffing, especially in the private sector; abuse from employers, colleagues, and patients' families; very low pay and workplace restrictions that seem to approach servitude; and widespread undervaluation, including low work and social status, even though, as the report itself notes, they save lives. The Indian Express story, headlined "Indian nurses still an exploited lot: Study," originated with the Thiruvananth-apuram press agency. The article quotes extensively from the study and relies on additional comment from the study author, as well as Indian Nursing Council member P. K. Thampi. The piece links the status of nursing to the fact that the profession remains predominantly female. The report notes briefly that some nurses do find opportunities and even "adventures" by taking their skills overseas, though it does not explore how that migration affects India. The piece might have sought more input from nurses themselves, particularly those working in the clinical setting, and it might have gotten some reaction to the study from government and hospital officials. But the article provides valuable information about the state of nursing in India today, and we thank those responsible. more...
October 29, 2012 -- The remarkable new BBC series Call the Midwife, now airing in the United States on PBS, offers a dramatic look at the exploits of Anglican and lay nurse-midwives caring for poor women and babies in London's East End in the late 1950's. In the first three episodes, the series presents the midwives as skilled, autonomous health workers whose ability varies in accord with their relevant experience. Tough, expert senior midwives guide the nervous newer ones. In one early scene, after police try ineffectively to stop a raucous street fight between two women, one of the commanding senior midwives brings the altercation to a halt with one sharp question. The nurses visit pregnant women to monitor their progress, deliver the babies under awful conditions, and advise the new mothers, all in an environment without birth control where women seem to function as baby factories and one-person day care centers. One woman has 24 children. The midwives also provide community health services. Physicians do appear occasionally when their special skills are needed. But for the most part the focus is on the nurses who provide the vast majority of the care, and physicians are marginal, in what amounts to a reversal of the standard Hollywood model. Indeed, the show is remarkably free of stereotypes. It's not free of sentiment and generic uplift, some of the scenes are too pretty for the supposedly gritty setting, and central character Jenny Lee seems a bit unformed. The show is not quite on Nurse Jackie's level, and of course the setting differs greatly. But like Nurse Jackie, Call the Midwife is an often powerful, funny, and nuanced look at skilled nurses saving and improving lives in world whose concern for the health of the poor is open to question. Where Jackie offers regular critiques of the U.S. health care financing system, Call the Midwife includes advertisements for the U.K.'s National Health Service, which was new in the 1950's. Based on a memoir by midwife Jennifer Worth (nee Lee) and written by Heidi Thomas, the six-episode BBC series was a big ratings success in the U.K., and a second season is on order. In the United States, it seems to be doing well for a PBS show. We thank those responsible for Call the Midwife, and we urge all nurses to watch and support it. more...and see the film clips!
Place FREE Truth About Nursing posters at your school or workplace -- it's good fun and good for you!
Tell colleagues and patients the truth! Our "I Am Your Registered Nurse" poster presents nurses as autonomous professionals on whom patients can rely. The poster explains that nurses are modern science professionals who protect and advocate for patients and empowers nurses to meet those challenges. Designed for the bedside, the poster comforts patients by educating them about the care environment and assuring them that nurses are there to fend for them.
Or consider the Truth's "Can Short Dresses Cause Short Staffing?" poster. This one takes humorous aim at the naughty nurse image that continues to haunt advertisements and other media, especially those aimed at males. The poster connects the naughty nurse image with the broader undervaluation that leads to gross underfunding of nursing education, research, and practice, ultimately threatening patients.
We'll send you up to 20 posters free to hang at your school or workplace. Just email us at info@truthaboutnursing.org to tell us how many you'd like and where to send them. If you'd like more, they are just 50 cents each! Thank you!
Teach medical students about the value of nursing
June 2012 -- Megan LeClair, RN, BSN, of the University of Wisconsin's Trauma and Life Support Center, recently performed a study based on a program from Dartmouth University in which medical students follow nurses at work to learn about the life-saving skills that nurses have. Her study was effective and we urge you to design your own! See the original Dartmouth program designed and led by Ellen Ceppetelli, RN, PhD. See Megan's abstract and results.
Encourage nurses who speak publicly to identify themselves as nurses!
August 2012 -- Elizabeth Winslow, RN, PhD, FAAN, wrote a great opinion piece in the August issue of the American Journal of Nursing entitled "We Silence Our Profession When We Fail to Identify Ourselves as Nurses." Winslow encourages nurses who speak publicly to weave into the message that the speaker is a nurse. We are reminded of a similarly great piece, "Pick Up That RN Flag and Wave It" by Pam Meredith, RN, NP, which appeared in Nursing Spectrum in December 2002. Get up, stand up, nurses!
The new Truth movie has everything...Sexual content! Raw insults! And odd, computer-generated voices! Watch now!
Check out the Truth's movie "Nursing: Isn't That Sweet?!" It's all about what happens when nurse Wendy encounters her old high school classmate Jim at a restaurant, many years later--after the two have taken their lives in very different directions! Can Wendy and Jim make a new connection? Or will things get a little ugly? Made using xtranormal software for Halloween 2011, the short video explores some chilling stereotypes that still infect public understanding of nursing. And for a different take on nursing stereotypes, check out the Truth's classic 2005 report "Nursing: Who Knew?" about a groundbreaking study in which leading researchers discover nurses' real contributions for the first time! See the video! Or if you can't access YouTube at your workplace, click here to see the video on our site. Thank you!
New Truth About Nursing FAQ:
Just how undervalued and underfunded is nursing?
In our new FAQ, we explore a few dramatic comparisons that illustrate how poorly nursing is valued and funded relative to medicine and other professions. See the comparisons...
See more news and media analysis on our archives pages:
More sitemap of The Truth About Nursing
VIdLit (Video Literature)
Script for a nurse-centered television drama
HealthStyles radio show with Diana Mason and Barbara Glickstein
Beatrice and Philip Kalisch archives on media images of nurses
Saving Lives: Why the Media's Portrayal of Nurses Puts Us All at Risk
Media, products and merchandise that raises public awareness of the value of nursing
Saving Lives: Why the Media's Portrayal of Nurses Puts Us All at Risk
News Alerts
In our imperfect state of conscience and enlightenment, publicity and the collision resulting from publicity are the best guardians of the interest of the sick.
-- Florence Nightingale
The URL for this page is www.truthaboutnursing.org
© 2008-2014 The Truth About Nursing. All Rights Reserved. | Legal Statement | Privacy Notice | Help | Contact us.