Help us improve understanding of nursing next year and beyond!
Dear Global Nursing Supporter:
We want to wish you a happy and healthy holiday season, and to thank you for all of your support over the past year. You are the reason we've had a real impact on public understanding of nursing worldwide. And we hope that we can count on your support in our year-end fundraiser, as we prepare to meet a host of new challenges in 2006.
Because of you, 2005 has been a year of great successes in our work to improve the global nursing image. For example:
• A Gillette television ad showed a sexy "nurse" climbing into bed with a patient, after being overcome with "lusty-nurse fever" caused by his TAG Body Spray. After 600 Center supporters objected, the company pulled the commercial.
• The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services' minority health campaign was called "Take a Loved One to the Doctor Day." After the Center pressed to have it include nurses, HHS changed the name to "Take a Loved One for a Check Up Day."
• A segment on "quick clinics" on NBC's "Today" show suggested that nurse practitioner care was unsafe. After 3,500 supporters protested, the show agreed to collaborate with a new Center-led working group of nursing organizations to improve its coverage.
And for the second year in a row, the American Academy of Nursing honored the Center with a Media Award. The AAN recognized our campaign ending Skechers' ads featuring Christina Aguilera dressed as a "naughty nurse," a campaign that drew over 3,000 letters and worldwide press coverage. The Center's 2004 award was for our prominent efforts to improve the nursing portrayal on NBC's "ER," which has showed some signs of improvement this season.
The Challenges
Clearly, we have made progress. Millions of people have a more accurate vision of nursing because of the Center's activities. Our news alerts, in-depth analyses and growing web site are an educational resource for nurses, the media, teachers, and anyone else interested in nursing and the media. For instance, one of our most popular web pages is the FAQ on naughty nurses. Our data suggest that people searching for naughty nurse images often bump into this page. When they do, they see a few examples, but they also see our explanation of how such stereotyping can damage their health care system.
The Center also does its best to "catch the media being good." We encourage those who create accurate images of nursing. Look for our third annual Golden Lamp awards later this month, when we honor the ten best (and worst) nursing portrayals we've seen this year.
But entertainment media products telling millions that nurses don't matter --from the alarming new television hits "House" (Fox) and "Grey's Anatomy" (ABC) to video games, toys, and fiction--appear all the time. Countless influential health pieces, in news media ranging from The New York Times to The Hindustan Times, continue to ignore nursing, or suggest that it consists of menial assistance to physicians. The powerful companies responsible continue to resist changing products that foster the same old stereotypes.
The Center is a small, member-supported non-profit. And our media monitoring, analysis and advocacy is a huge challenge. It takes lots of research and writing, communication with groups and contacts, and complex Internet efforts. We handle campaigns and analyses related to media products from Canada to Thailand, from Poland to South Africa. Our mostly volunteer staff can pursue only a small part of the media products that merit our attention.
So we urge you to make a year-end donation to help us continue and expand our work. Please click here to become a Center member online. It's quick and easy!
Lack of understanding must be addressed to resolve the global nursing crisis
Nurses are the critical front-line caregivers in health care today. They often make the difference between life and death, self-sufficiency and dependency, hope and despair. You know this! But too many people don't. And that is a factor in the global nursing shortage that has claimed countless lives and threatens to overwhelm our health systems.
Why do we say that? Because few non-nurses, including our health care colleagues, really understand what nurses do. And when even our colleagues don't understand, there is little chance that legislators, CEOs, or young career seekers will. This vacuum of knowledge is filled by long-standing social assumptions that are fostered and reinforced by the media. Indeed, research shows that the media, including entertainment products, has a real effect on the public's health care views and actions. More resources are needed for nursing clinical practice (including safe staffing), education, and research. Indeed, patients' lives depend on it. But if nursing is seen as lowly "women's work" that consists of changing bedpans and having sex with physicians and patients, there is little reason to provide those resources, especially in today's severely stressed health financing systems.
Because of the lack of overall understanding worldwide, nurses must sustain a collective effort to shape media portrayals of their work. We must educate society in order to obtain more social, political and financial support. As Florence Nightingale once said:
[I]n our imperfect state of conscience and enlightenment, publicity and the collision resulting from publicity are the best guardians of the interest of the sick.
The Center's vision
To help us move toward a world where society really respects nursing--and allocates its resources accordingly--the Center must be able to shape media portrayals in a more proactive and broad-based way. We must be able to do far more to:
• train and work with those who create media portrayals.
• educate the public in more direct and innovative ways.
• encourage the media to use nurses as expert sources and advisors.
• encourage nurses to create media and speak up about their work.
That's where you come in. In a 2004 American Journal of Nursing editorial, three prominent nursing leaders--Claire Fagin, Diana Mason and Pam Maraldo--urged nurses to "honor yourself and your colleagues by supporting the Center for Nursing Advocacy."
Please heed the call. Just click here to learn about the great gifts you can receive for joining or renewing your Center membership, including our cool new t-shirts! And because the Center is a 501(c)(3) charity, your gift is tax-deductible as allowed by law.
Why do we need your help today?
We are an independent, member-supported charity, and our work takes resources. We must pay for computers, software, office equipment and supplies, transportation, Internet products and services, insurance, postage and telephone costs. Our office is donated by members. And while Center staffers have donated over 99% of our total labor over the past four years, they will need to begin receiving a living wage in order for our efforts to be sustainable over the long term. And for that, we need broad-based member support. Our donor levels start at just $9 for students, but we urge those of you who can do more to give as generously as possible to support our work.
Wherever you live in the world, no matter why you are interested in improving understanding of nursing, please support the Center for Nursing Advocacy. Together we can help nurses strengthen their profession worldwide, and give patients the kind of health care they deserve in the coming year and beyond. We're counting on you to help make this work! Thank you!
Sandy Summers, RN, MSN, MPH
Executive Director
The Center for Nursing Advocacy
203 Churchwardens Rd.
Baltimore, MD 21212-2937
office 410-323-1100
fax 410-510-1790
ssummers@truthaboutnursing.org
www.truthaboutnursing.org
Click here to become a member now. Thank you!
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Educate the world that nurses save lives!
