Please support the Truth About Nursing and our efforts
to change how the world thinks about nursing in 2013!
From the Truth's Board of Directors:
Dear Supporter,
Happy New Year! During 2012, the Truth About Nursing has raised about $21,000 to fund our efforts to change how the world thinks about nursing.
And with these funds, we have been able to continue advocating and educating, telling the mass media, powerful decision-makers, and the public at large what nurses really do to save lives and improve outcomes, as you can see through the Truth's main webpage.
But we need your help now to reach our goal of $25,000 in annual revenue by year's end. Since we are a 501(c)(3) charity, your gifts to support our work are tax-deductible as allowed by law. This is your last chance for 2012 -- please donate now!
Would you be able to donate just $25 to the Truth About Nursing to help us reach our goal? Please click here to see our member gifts, available with each donation.
Whatever you can afford, your gift will support our efforts to improve understanding of nursing, which will help our patients live longer, healthier and happier lives. Thank you!
Why does helping people understand nursing matter?
When people think nursing is unskilled loser work, or that nurses exist to serve physicians, then nurses have a tough time getting the resources they need to provide good nursing care. Nurses are spread too thinly because many have been replaced by lesser-educated workers who can't assess or intervene as nurses can. Decision-makers believe that non-nurses can perform nursing work because they do not understand the nature or value of nursing. That leads to poor care--and sadly, even death.
The Truth About Nursing fights this deadly lack of understanding. Decision-makers get these wrong ideas from many sources, but especially by watching, reading and listening to the omnipresent media. The media constantly tells us that physicians are the only health professionals whose work matters. Physicians deserve credit for their good work, but not for the work of nurses. And when physicians get credit for nurses' work, they get the funding for it too. That's why nursing residencies only get $1 for every $375 that physicians residencies get. That's why the NIH gives nursing researchers only half of one percent of its budget, even though nurses work on the cutting edge of health care and make up the largest body of health professionals.
As a report by the Institute of Medicine recently stressed, in order for the health care crisis to end, nurses must be a part of the decision-making process. That means more resources and respect. Hospitals exist mainly to provide nursing care, but nurses rarely hold positions of leadership; few nurses serve on hospital boards. Why should any nursing institution be run by anything less than a majority of nurses? Yet that's the status quo in the vast majority of health institutions across the world.
Saving Lives soon back in print!
Our book Saving Lives: Why the Media's Portrayal of Nurses Puts Us All at Risk continues to influence nurses, the media, and members of the public around the world. Always available in digital form through Barnes & Noble, Amazon, and iTunes, the book will be available again in paperback in a couple weeks! If you donate now, we will send you a copy when the books come in.
Saving Lives has won an American Journal of Nursing Book of the Year Award and an award from the international nursing honor society, Sigma Theta Tau. Many nursing professors use the book as a text to discuss nursing in society.
With your help, we can continue to deliver hundreds of copies of Saving Lives to influential media creators and decision-makers. And you can get a free copy--hard copy or digital--with every $30 donation to the Truth About Nursing!
Presentations and Speaking Engagements
You can also help support the Truth About Nursing by inviting our founder and executive director, Sandy Summers, to speak at your conference, graduation, nurses' week event or other gathering. Click to see Sandy's schedule, abstract, biography or references from past speaking engagements. Please contact us to schedule an event.
Our posters
Place Truth About Nursing posters at your school or workplace!
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.
For every dollar that you donate, we'll send you up to 4 posters 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. Thank you!
Nurses must become stronger
More nurses must become leaders in hospitals, non-profit organizations, and the government. But that's not going to happen unless we work together to change the way people think about nursing. That means changing how the media depicts nurses. Particularly because of the quickly expanding elderly populations in many nations, the future of health care depends on nursing. If people don't know what nursing is or why it matters, the profession won't get the funding it needs, and the global nursing shortage will continue to spiral out of control. More patients will suffer and die.
This is what we try to prevent every day.
Please do what you can to help us!
We are a member-supported charity operating on a tiny budget. We depend mainly on volunteer labor. But with more resources, we could do so much more.
Please click here to see our awesome member gifts, including bumper stickers, pens, RN patches, and DVDs of good depictions of nursing. We have a full range of things you can give your friends, family and colleagues that will help change their thinking about nursing.
Please donate now to support our work. Thank you!
Gina Pistulka, RN, PhD, MSN, MPH, Chair
Kelly Bower Joffe, RN, PhD, MSN, MPH, Treasurer
Rich Kimball,
RN, PhD, MSN, MPH, Secretary
Christine Stainton, RN, MSN, Board Member
Sandy Summers, RN, MSN, MPH, Board Member, Executive Director
The Truth About Nursing
203 Churchwardens Rd.
Baltimore, MD USA 21212-2937
office 1-410-323-1100
board@truthaboutnursing.org
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Educate the world that nurses save lives!
