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News on Nursing in the Media
March 7, 2010 -- The issue of People magazine dated December 27, 2010 includes Poison singer and reality TV star Bret Michaels as one of its "most intriguing" people of 2010, in a two-page layout dominated by a photo of Michaels surrounded by four naughty nurse models, a reference to his well-publicized recovery from a brain hemorrhage and other health problems. In Justin Stephens' photo, the models' outfits are not extreme by naughty nurse standards--very short white "nurse dresses" and high heels, caps 'n' cleavage. But their poses and facial expressions, along with the ways they are touching Michaels and brandishing basic health equipment, clearly present an image of generic seduction. This is not the first time the enterprising Mr. Michaels has used naughty nurse imagery in connection with publicity of his health problems. In a blog post following his emergency appendectomy in April 2010, he said that he had "hot nurses" taking care of him, referring to the "nurse fantasy" that "every man has." Maybe naughty nurse imagery helps Mr. Michaels meet some hair metal cliché quota and reduce the sense of illness-related vulnerability that might be bad for a celebrity whose image is built on strength and sexual attractiveness. But whatever it's fair to expect of Mr. Michaels, we can certainly expect People magazine--which "reaches more adult readers (more than 45 million as of fall 2009) with each issue than any consumer magazine ever"--to resist such an obvious reinforcement of the brainless naughty nurse image that has long undermined real nurses' claims to respect and resources. We contacted the CEO of Time Inc., and later, People editor Larry Hackett called us in response. He apologized and promised that People will use no other degrading images of nurses while he is there. People also published Truth director Sandy Summers's letter explaining why such images are harmful in the Mailbag section of today's issue. We commend the magazine for being responsive to our concerns about the image of nurses. We have given People some ideas about real nurses whose life-saving work it may wish to highlight. If you have any suggestions about such nurses, please send them to us, and we will collect them and present them to People. Thank you! more...
October 11, 2010 -- Today The Washington Post ran an excellent op-ed by Veneta Masson, the Washington, D.C. nurse practitioner and writer, based on an article she wrote for this month's Health Affairs. Explaining why she no longer gets annual mammograms, Masson discusses the research about the flawed test, finding no evidence that it actually saves lives. And she points to downsides including the severe harm many suffer from unnecessary treatment following false positives. The Post rightly describes Masson as a "nurse practitioner," even though she no longer practices, because nursing is a profession. But a story on the mammogram debate that aired today on National Public Radio's Morning Edition was not so good for nursing. Richard Knox's piece includes a brief statement by Masson, but it refers to her as a "former nurse practitioner." By contrast, it's unusual to hear a reference to a "former physician." In addition, NPR cites Masson only as a "patient" to provide balance for the views of another patient who supports screening but who has no evident health expertise. Then the piece shifts to quotes from "experts," implying that Masson is not one, despite her 20 years as an NP and the fact that her articles discuss the relevant research in some detail. NPR does include as an "expert" a public health physician who chaired the Federal Task Force on Mammograms but who appears to have no professional expertise in oncology. The online version of the NPR story at least mentions Masson's Health Affairs article, but the broadcast does not. We thank Masson and the Post for helping the public understand that nurses are articulate, informed health advocates. more...
February 22, 2011 -- Derek Cianfrance's Blue Valentine offers a bleak but compelling look at a broken love. Cindy and Dean live, if you can call it that, with their six-year-old daughter in Scranton, Pennsylvania. The movie mixes scenes of the couple's current alienation with flashbacks to the time when they fell in love. This flicking of the joy-pain switch can be punishing, but with great acting and mostly fine writing, the movie has the grainy, mysterious power of an ultrasound image that you don't quite want to see. When Cindy met Dean, she was a smart college student with dreams of becoming a physician. Now she is a beleaguered working mother who seems trapped by her life, and especially by Dean, who has become a devoted father but a sour, verbally abusive husband who hangs around smoking cigarettes when he is not painting houses. He wants only what he can't have anymore: Cindy's love. She works at an obstetrics office, and some elements of the film suggest she is a nurse; others suggest she may be an ultrasound technician. Although this is not a major studio release, the film has won critical praise, and Michelle Williams has been nominated for an Academy Award for her portrayal of Cindy. So the movie may be influential in reinforcing the stereotype of nursing as a job that ambitious women have to settle for if they can't become physicians. The film does not show how Cindy got into her work, but it clearly does not light up her life, and it seems like a job she took after she got pregnant and had to drop out of college, rather than a fulfilling profession that would itself require college training. And as Cindy might agree, even small flaws in an important image can make a big difference. more...
January 23, 2011 -- A few days ago the London Evening Standard reported that Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, who is now under investigation for alleged corruption and paying underage prostitutes for sex, had hosted parties at which young women were asked to don naughty nurse attire for "lesbian stripper acts." Today, a short item on the New York Times website reported that one wiretap had revealed a Berlusconi agent telling a young party invitee to wear a "nurse's outfit" with "nothing underneath except white garters." That must be what the prime minister was thinking of in December 2006 when he thanked his nurses at the Cleveland Clinic, where he had just had a pacemaker implanted, by noting that "Italian nurses are better looking. . . These ones scare me a bit. Don't even think about leaving me alone at night with one of them." It's encouraging to know that such national leaders, who make key decisions about funding for nursing practice and education, regard nurses so highly and have such a keen appreciation for their work. Anyway, we hope that the 74-year-old media magnate has more than teenage stripper "nurses" to take care of him should he ever require further health care. more...
November 18, 2010 -- Recent press items highlight the ongoing conflicts about the future role of nurses in U.S. health care, particularly whether advanced practice nurses (APRNs) can practice independently of physicians, in light of the extension of health insurance coverage to 32 million more Americans under the new health care reform law. As usual, nurses, scholars, policymakers, and patients seem to welcome the expansion of nurses' scope of practice, while some physician groups claim that the APRNs need physician "supervision," despite the ever-growing body of research indicating that APRN care is at least as good as that of physicians. Today, physician Pauline Chen's "Doctor and Patient" column offered a positive, if somewhat vague, endorsement of the potential contributions of nurses in primary care, in the wake of a new report by the highly regarded Institute of Medicine calling for APRNs to be given the authority to practice independently and nursing education to be standardized. Chen even quotes two nursing leaders! On October 5, in a Kaiser Health News article posted on the MSNBC web site, Andrew Villegas and Mary Agnes Carey provided a more specific account of the IOM report, though unfortunately it quoted no nurses (!) and failed to counter the unsupported safety concerns of the physicians it did quote. On August 3, Katherine Hobson posted an item on the Wall Street Journal's Health Blog reporting that yet another study, this one from Health Affairs, had shown that the care of nurse anesthetists presents no greater risk to patients than the care of anesthesiologists. And on April 14, the Associated Press issued a comprehensive and mostly fair article by Carla K. Johnson about recent legislative efforts to expand U.S. APRNs' scope of practice in anticipation of the expansion in health coverage, and the fierce resistance of physician groups trying to protect their turf. We thank those responsible for these pieces, all of which make at least some contribution to the current discussions of APRN practice and U.S. health care reform. more...
January 25, 2011 -- Much of the press coverage of the tragic January 8 shooting of U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and others in Tucson, Arizona, has focused on the responses of the local health care system. Unfortunately, as is generally the case in reporting about such mass casualty events, only physicians have been consulted about the victims' status, and the coverage has given the impression that physicians provided all the hospital care that mattered. A typical example is a 3,500-word report by Denise Grady and Jennifer Medina that ran on the front page of The New York Times on January 15. The long piece describes the experiences of a paramedic and the husband of one victim, but otherwise it is devoted to the actions, opinions, and feelings of five University of Arizona Medical Center (UMC) physicians, sending the message that physicians alone were responsible for the skilled hospital care the victims got, even though expert nurses kept them alive from the moment they arrived. No nurse is identified or quoted. This is not just a matter of fairness and accuracy. When millions of people are told, in riveting terms, that physicians alone save lives, it confirms that only physicians are worthy of real respect and resources to do their work. We did see one minor counter-example: a 565-word piece that ran today in the Arizona Daily Star and was aptly titled, "UMC nurses who staffed ICU called 'unsung heroes.'" Becky Pallack's story--the result of a press conference commendably held by UMC--does show that nurses were involved in caring for the victims and includes comment from two of them. Unfortunately, nothing we hear in the piece shows that nurses are autonomous professionals who were just as responsible for saving victims' lives as physicians were. Instead, there are statements about bonding and hugs. No doubt these reflect good psychosocial care, but sadly, they are also fully consistent with the unskilled angel stereotype. One UMC nurse says that "all we want as nurses" is to see patients thrive. But patients can't thrive if their nurses aren't respected. more...
September 29, 2010 -- Tonight NBC's long-running drama Law and Order: Special Victims Unit offered a portrayal of a sexual assault forensic nurse as part of an episode intended, commendably, to highlight the nationwide backlog in analyzing rape kits. But sadly, this was a highly damaging misportrayal of nursing, with the nameless nurse presented as an insensitive technician who carefully collects evidence but utters not one word to the distraught rape victim. The plotline is reminiscent of a November 2004 SVU episode in which a SAFE nurse did get a name and a few lines, but likewise came off as an awkward assistant to the lead female detective character Olivia Benson, who provides all emotional care to the victim. The new plotline does not so strongly imply that Benson is actually directing the exam, but here the nurse character is far more callous.She gets no name and no introduction, and 
she goes about her work saying nothing, even when she hurts the patient--no warning, no apology, no explanation. Of course, since the show never bothers to identify her to viewers as a nurse, maybe viewers will not see her as one. In real life, it's unlikely a police detective would be present at all for this exam, but it has always been very important to the show to present Benson as the 24/7 advocate and savior of rape victims, so it's no surprise that she again usurps much of the nurse's role. The show also remains eager to portray rape exams as awful ordeals in which the victim is re-traumatized by an insensitive evidence collector, arguably associating the SAFE nurse more with the rape itself than the prosecution. In the 2004 episode, a prosecutor actually described the exam as a "sexual humiliation" comparable to the rape itself. We assume SVU's longtime show runner Neal Baer--a physician who also wrote for ER--knows better than to portray nursing this way. But he and Jonathan Greene, who wrote this episode, seem to have other priorities. more...and see the film clip!
December 31, 2010 -- Today the Ghana News site posted a short article about birth complications and pre-natal care that relied entirely on expert comment from senior nurse midwives. The unsigned Ghana News Service (GNA) piece focused on the threat that unsafe abortions pose to later pregnancies, as well as the importance of pre-natal care in protecting mothers and newborns. The report does attribute one odd statement to its main midwife source, a comment that her hospital had not seen any infant or maternal mortality in the past year "as doctors responded promptly to emergency cases"--as if nurses themselves did not play a central role in emergency care. On the whole, though, the piece is an unusual and commendable example of media reliance on nursing expertise. more...
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January 12, 2011 -- Tonight's series premiere of ABC's new Shonda Rhimes drama Off the Map introduced the standard complement of seven smart, attractive physician characters saving lives, as the hot senior ones train the hot junior ones. Set at a clinic "somewhere in South America" that seems to be staffed mainly by U.S. physicians, the show does display a little more awareness of global public health issues than Rhimes' other surgeon-centric products. And it occasionally includes pointed criticism of the cultural insensitivity and narrow vision of health care displayed by a couple newly arrived physicians. But clinic boss Ben Keeton (right) was also supposedly the youngest chief of surgery ever at UCLA before starting the clinic, and one of the new physicians gushes that he's "one of the greatest humanitarians of our time." Whatever nuggets the show may include about U.S. arrogance and caring for the poor, the main theme still seems to be U.S. physicians saving native people and tourists, especially in trauma settings. We're not quite sure how to take the premiere's title, "Saved By the Great White Hope." Maybe the show is being ironic, but the show does reflect the basic Rhimes world view that physicians are demi-gods. Every clinical scene features physicians alone providing all skilled care, including lots of care that nurses do in real life. There are no significant nurse characters, and in the premiere, we saw only two notable references to nursing, both damaging, and both involving recently arrived U.S. physician Mina Minard. In one scene, Minard demands epinephrine for a clinic patient who is having an asthma attack, and a local nurse in patterned scrubs fetches and hands it over. Minard grabs the drug, saves the patient, and receives all the credit. In the other scene, Minard complains to a fellow U.S. physician that the other physician is lucky to have a seriously ill patient to care for, because Minard just "handed out Band-Aids today…like a school nurse!" Minard starts to learn that the clinic's less exotic care has value, and she will likely grow in other ways. But we doubt anyone will question the assumption that nurses are low-skilled lackeys who play no important role in health care, whether at elite hospitals or remote clinics--whose foreign health professionals are, incidentally, more likely to be nurses than physicians, as is the case with Médecins Sans Frontières. The series premiere was written by series creator Jenna Bans. more...and please join our letter-writing campaign!
All the work, none of the pay, zero glory
June 7, 2010 -- The second season of Showtime's Nurse Jackie continued to offer the most thoughtful and persuasive treatment of nursing issues on U.S. television. The season also featured more of emergency nurse Jackie Peyton's drug abuse, adultery, and webs of deceit. However, as always, Jackie's issues are not nursing stereotypes, but the troubles of one complex individual. As the season approached tonight's finale, Jackie and her protégé Zoey Barkow continued to display clinical prowess. Jackie skillfully worked the system to help a despairing lymphoma patient find some relief from his debilitating nausea and to provide some expert, if unpleasant, advice to an ex-football star with early onset dementia. Meanwhile, Zoey saved a boy's life by intubating and resuscitating him, and saved another patient by picking up on a blood clot that could easily have led to a pulmonary embolism, something the arrogant but marginal physician Fitch Cooper missed. The show's final episodes also included a somewhat ambiguous take on men in nursing. Nurse Sam is shown to be a fairly cool, perceptive individual with an attractive girlfriend, but she breaks up with Sam after sleeping with Cooper, saying she is doing so because Sam is a nurse. Sam proceeds to break Cooper's nose. This could be interpreted as a frank examination or even subversion of anti-male nurse bias, a reinforcement of that bias, or all of the above. More troubling were the show's confused messages about nursing authority. Several plotlines had Cooper wrongly asserting that he was in charge of and could even fire nurses, with no direct rebuttal. Cooper did more than once end up in nurse manager Gloria Akalitus's office seeking to have her discipline nurses, with little success, which at least suggested that he could not take a significant adverse employment action on his own. But why can't some character just state that although nurses do have less power, they do not report to physicians because they practice a distinct, autonomous profession? In any case, the show still provides U.S. television's most compelling account of the value of nursing, and it does not hurt that the show's dramatic quality remains higher than that of any other hospital show. We thank those responsible for the show. more...
October 21, 2010 -- In recent New York Times articles on substantive health care topics, the treatment of nursing ranges from very good to abysmal. At one end of the spectrum is Lesley Alderman's June 20 "Patient Money" piece on discharge planning, which offers some good practical tips for patients but fails to consult a single nurse, even though nurses have been primarily responsible for discharge planning for over a century and still are, at least to the extent under-staffing allows. Alderman discusses the newly created job of "discharge planner," but it's not clear most readers would know that these are often nurses, and the piece manages to leave the impression that discharge planning is something physicians recently invented. Almost as bad is today's "Doctor and Patient" column by Pauline Chen, M.D., which explores problems associated with the use of contact precautions for vulnerable patients. Chen sometimes does a very good job of highlighting nurses' role in care, but this piece shows a disappointing lack of recognition that nurses are the professionals most involved with contact precautions. Chen speaks of "clinicians," but she quotes only physicians, and the word "nurse" does not even appear. Much better is Gardiner Harris's long August 20 report on the dangers posed to hospital patients by look-alike tubes. That piece conveys the central role nurses play in the care involved and even briefly consults a couple nurses, though it focuses mainly on physicians and others involved in relevant U.S. device approval processes. Best of all is Milt Freudenheim's long June 29 piece on geriatric care. That report spends plenty of time on physicians, but it also focuses to a large extent on the roles and views of geriatric care nurses, quoting nurse practitioners and nursing leaders, including pioneering scholars Mary Naylor and Terry Fulmer. On the whole, Times health reporting and commentary still fall way short of giving a fair account of the importance of nursing, but there are good pieces from time to time, and we thank the paper for those. more...
Register Now for The Truth's First Annual Conference: Empowering Nurses and Improving Care
January 28, 2011 -- Register now with an early bird registration discount of $395 (student discount 35%) before February 10th. The Truth About Nursing's first annual conference will be held in New Orleans the weekend of April 15-17, 2011, at the beautiful Marriott Renaissance Arts Hotel, located in the heart of this fabulous city! The conference theme is "Empowering Nurses and Improving Care Through Better Understanding of Nursing." Speakers will include Kathleen Bartholomew, Donna Cardillo, Sandy Summers, and a representative of Rutgers University's 2012 Project, who will tell us how to get more nurses into politics! Other topics include enhancing public understanding of nursing through the media, educating decision-makers and physician colleagues about nursing, effective strategies to improve working relationships, and practical steps toward achieving nursing empowerment. This work is critical in helping the nursing profession get the respect and resources that it deserves and that patients need. Registration will open soon, and continuing education credits are anticipated. Exciting events include a welcome cocktail reception and a Riverboat Jazz Dinner Cruise on the Mississippi. Come enjoy the food and culture of the Crescent City as you explore how to move nursing forward! Get details here...
The 2010 Truth About Nursing Awards Rank Best and Worst Media Portrayals of Nursing
ListJanuary 6, 2011 -- The Truth About Nursing announces the eighth annual list of the best and worst media portrayals of nurses. The year 2010 featured the continuation of Nurse Jackie and two other nurse-focused U.S television shows, but it also included countless damaging distortions from long-running hits like Grey's Anatomy and a new crop of "naughty nurse" imagery from sources ranging from Mariah Carey to Helen Mirren to Dr. Oz. more...
December 2, 2010 -- Today MSNBC ran a short "weird news" item about a common event: sexual abuse based at least partly on patients' assumption that it's OK if the victim is a nurse. Teresa Masterson's piece tells the story of Joseph Wolf of Allentown, PA, a man who reportedly claimed that the reason he twice grabbed an emergency room nurse's buttocks was to say "thank you" for her care. Of course, this is a creative justification for abuse, but countless nurses have been "thanked" this way throughout their careers. What makes this story more notable is what Wolf apparently told the nurse after grabbing her: "Well, you're a nurse, right?" In other words, it's part of your job to provide sexual services, or at least to endure sexual abuse. Where would people get the idea that nurses are sex toys? Could it be the media, at least to some extent? You know--the same media the produces The Dr. Oz Show, which just last month included a segment featuring naughty "nurses" dancing with Oz as an "attempt at humor" in a segment about losing weight? When a prominent physician like Oz doesn't get it--even his "apology" suggested that he thought the nurses who objected were just too sensitive--what chance does the average patient have to understand these issues? It's as hard to imagine Oz dancing with women in naughty physician or lawyer outfits as it is to imagine a person following up a sexual assault with, "well, you're a physician," or "well, you're a lawyer." We thank MSNBC and other news outlets for reporting on this incident. But we saw no hint in these stories that most nurses experience this kind of abuse, or that not enough is done to address the abuse, to say nothing of the stereotypes that underlie it. more...
December 6, 2010 -- Today reporter Lynn Elber of the Associated Press covered our campaign to ask Mehmet Oz, host of The Dr. Oz Show, to apologize and make amends for a November 4 weight loss segment in which "nurses" "got sexy" and danced with Oz. The AP story quoted Truth director Sandy Summers and American Nurses Association spokeswoman Joan Hurwitz, who called the segment a "sexist caricature of nursing." The story was picked up by 2,200 news organs across the world, including the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Bloomberg BusinessWeek, Online Nigeria, the Times of India, New Zealand Yahoo and the Arabic language Wael El-Ebrashy. Some publications wrote their own pieces; these included The Hartford Courant ("Does your nurse dance/dress provocatively?"), the Sydney Morning Herald, the Daily Mail, and TV Guide. In a statement released to the AP in response to the story, the show said that Oz "has worked alongside extraordinary nursing professionals throughout his medical career and holds nurses in the highest regard as they save lives and heal patients. Any attempt at humor should never call into question Dr. Oz's utmost respect for the nurses with whom he works and has lauded in other shows." The statement said that the segment "included a costume that was considered offensive to some and we apologize if there were any hurt feelings," and the show promised to "do better in the future." This is progress, though the hedging phrases "considered offensive to some" and "hurt feelings" clearly suggest that the show thinks the nurses who objected are just being too sensitive and that no serious issues are involved here. To our knowledge the show has done nothing to show that it really understands what it did wrong or that Oz intends to address the issue personally or to make amends. For instance, Oz might do something on air to address the poor public understanding of nursing to which his show contributed; he might show specifically how nurses "save lives and heal patients." Apart from the "saving lives" bit, the vague "lauding" on display in Oz's statement means little. But we believe that Oz and his producers do at least understand now that there is some problem with naughty nurse imagery, and that they will hesitate before using it again. We thank those who wrote the hundreds of powerful letters to Dr. Oz in support of the campaign. You made this possible! more...
October 2010 -- The cover story in this month's Reader's Digest offers a fairly strong look at hospital errors, relying mainly on short personal essays by five health professionals. Three are physicians, and the feature has other physician-centric elements, including the title on the magazine's cover, "Doctors Confess Their Fatal Mistakes." But the final essay is by nurse Sunnie Bell, who gives a powerful account of how a patient died because a physician ignored Bell's warnings. Bell then urges several specific improvements in nurses' working conditions. Her essay vividly illustrates how disrespect for nursing can kill, and it at least suggests the role nurses should play as patient advocates. Another piece, a sad story by a pharmacist who was criminally prosecuted for a deadly error, also shows that physicians are not the only health professionals whose work matters. One of the physician pieces is by Johns Hopkins's Peter Pronovost, a health care errors expert who has become well known for his efforts to promote the use of checklists and other safety measures. Pronovost makes a point, as he often does, to include nursing empowerment as a key element of reform. And a sidebar with short descriptions of some new patient safety ideas includes one about Boston's Brigham and Women's Hospital, where "WalkRounds" are done by "senior executives," a category that reportedly includes the chief nursing officer! Some publications would have mentioned only the CEO and the chief of medicine. Unfortunately, an essay by University of California San Francisco physician Robert Wachter indicates a distressing lack of awareness of the role nurses play in monitoring patient conditions and in hospital care generally, as the author attributes a failure to detect an impending pulmonary embolism 30 years ago solely to himself (as a second year medical student) and the hierarchy of physicians on duty. On the whole, though, Joe Kita's cover story includes nursing to an extent that is unusual for such an influential publication. We commend him and Reader's Digest. more...
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Thinking right, thinking bright!
November 4, 2010 -- Today the popular daytime television program The Dr. Oz Show offered viewers an amazingly concentrated package of harmful nursing stereotypes, all wrapped up in a short segment about Angel Williams, who lost 200 pounds by dancing. We're all for any safe and effective weight loss strategy. But Williams dressed in a regressive short white nurse's dress, said she was going to "get sexy" and unbuttoned the top of the dress as she prepared to lead Oz in some dancing, and told Oz that she and a group of similarly attired dancers would be "your nurses, we're gonna keep America moving for you." No doubt the show thought it would be fun to present these women as Oz's sexy nurse backup dancers--doesn't every celebrity physician have those? Especially surgeons like Dr. Oz! Unfortunately, this short segment managed to reinforce a slew of stereotypes: the naughty nurse, the low-skilled physician handmaiden, and the idea that nursing is for females living in a past era. And far from looking uncomfortable about these nursing elements, Oz himself twice referred to the dancers as Williams's "fellow nurses." After Williams told Oz what the "nurses" would do "for" him, Oz responded, "I love it." We don't. Please tell Dr. Oz that nurses are skilled, autonomous health professionals--despite the Oprah protégé's multimedia health empire and his position on the Columbia Medical School faculty, it's not clear that he knows. more... please join our letter-writing campaign! or see our press release.
Attracting more women--and nurses--to politics
November 2, 2010 -- As we look forward from today's general election in the U.S., the 2012 Project wants to tell the Truth's members about the Project's non-profit, non-partisan campaign to encourage women in eight target fields - including nursing - to pursue public office in the United States. The Project aims to diversify U.S. policy-making bodies along gender and professional lines. The Project is affiliated with Rutgers, New Jersey's state university, and it is gaining national attention, with recent coverage on CNN American Morning and in the Washington Post. You can also learn more from the 2012 Project's website, www.the2012project.us. The Project's faculty of women who formerly held elective office speak to the impact of serving in public office. The Project's faculty wants to present to women in nursing, including at conferences and meetings. Following presentations, the Project helps connect interested persons to political resources that will help them succeed. If an in-person presentation is not possible, the Project is glad to explore alternatives, including webinars. The Project may also be able to craft an online piece about the impact of nurses serving in public office. The Truth believes that nursing would benefit if more nurses--male and female--assumed positions of influence, because nurse decision-makers would be more likely to understand the importance and current needs of the profession. We urge supporters to consider how the Project might help them help nursing. more...
How do so many journalists miss it?
September 27, 2010 -- Today The Washington Post published a lengthy entry in its "Medical Mysteries" series headlined "Nurse solves mysterious ailment that puzzled orthopedists, oncologist." Sandra G. Boodman's piece describes a local man who spent more than a year consulting various specialist physicians, enduring "two unnecessary knee surgeries and dozens of physical therapy sessions, as well as acupuncture and other useless and sometimes painful treatments that cost thousands of dollars," before "a nurse" at an infectious disease specialist's office suggested that he might have Lyme disease. He did. You might think, then, that the article would be a tribute to nursing expertise, but instead the central fact of the story is overwhelmed by disrespect for nursing. It's not just that the piece repeatedly dismisses what the nurse did by calling it "simple" and "obvious," "a basic query by a nurse, not the acumen of five specialists." No, the most striking thing is that in this 1,300 word story describing all the erroneous thinking of the "specialists," the nurse who actually solved the problem is never named, quoted, or further described. It's true that none of the specialists are named or quoted directly either, which certainly protects them from embarrassment. And it seems that the approach of these pieces is to rely mainly on the patient's account; perhaps this patient never actually met the nurse, though he says he "remains grateful" to the nurse. But the piece does name and quote an infectious-disease expert the patient consulted after the diagnosis, so it might have done more with the nurse, even if could not give the nurse's real name. The net effect of what we do have here is to suggest that the nurse solved the problem by being so simple and limited, with a mind uncluttered by real expertise. Needless to say, there is no suggestion that maybe the nurse solved the problem because of her own expertise, or the nature of nursing, including the profession's holistic and flexible approach, which is no less "expert" for being broad. The piece pokes fun at the specialist physicians, but it still reinforces the idea that they are the main source of health knowledge--the same idea that seems to have gotten this patient in so much trouble. more...
37 to 0? 
September 2010 -- As the 2010-2011 U.S. television season starts, there appears to be no major nurse character on any regular prime time broadcast show for the first time in more than 40 years. In part that is because so many of the health-related shows from last year have left the air, including all of the shows that premiered in 2009, notably NBC's generally helpful nurse drama Mercy, but also CBS's physician-centric Three Rivers and Miami Medical, which did each have one recurring nurse character. Other departures had little effect on the portrayal of nursing, including the ends of the long-running Scrubs (ABC), which had shed its lone nurse character the prior season, and FX's nip-tuck, which never had a significant nurse character. The one returning show that did have a nurse character, ABC's Private Practice (premieres Sept. 23), killed him off at the end of last season, when nurse midwife Dell Parker died from a car crash, just after giddily announcing that he had been admitted to medical school. The dominant hospital shows, Fox's House (Sept. 20) and ABC's Grey Anatomy (Sept. 23), still have no nurse characters as they start their seventh seasons. There appear to be just two new shows with any real health care focus: ABC's Body of Proof (October), which stars Dana Delany as an elite surgeon-turned-medical examiner, and ABC's Off the Map (mid-season), a new product from Grey's creator Shonda Rhimes about five young physicians who work to save the poor at a remote clinic in South America. We see no nurse characters anywhere, though there are conflicting signals about whether one minor character on Off the Map is a nurse or physician. Leaving aside that mid-season character, of the five health-related prime time broadcast shows that are slated to start seasons this year, regular physician characters appear to outnumber nurse characters by roughly 37 to 0. Of course, nurses will not be completely absent from the small screen, since non-regular season cable shows Nurse Jackie (Showtime) and HawthoRNe (TNT) will return for third seasons in 2011. And there is even a nurse character on A&E's new summer police drama The Glades, which will return next year (though she is carrying on Dell's Hollywood dream by attending medical school). But given the dominance of the broadcast shows, which attract millions more viewers to many more episodes, the television landscape will remain dominated by programs that reinforce the false notion that physicians provide all important health care. more...
"A midwife in a world of doctors"
August 2010 -- In the last episodes of the third season of ABC's Private Practice, the show killed off its one nurse character, midwife Dell Parker. That was no great loss to nursing, but the plotline that played out in the May 6 and 13, 2010 episodes included attacks on the profession, most notably through Dell's elation at having just been admitted to medical school. That was a powerful reinforcement of the enduring Hollywood fantasy that the most able nurses achieve by going to medical school, when in fact they are perhaps 100 times more likely to attend graduate school in nursing. The wannabe-physician stereotype is one with which real advanced practice nurses and of the wannabe-physician stereotype with which real advanced practice nurses and men in nursing must still contend. In an amusing twist, the key May 6 episode was written by physician Fred Einesman, a former advisor to NBC's ER, which also pushed the wannabe-physician theme. Private Practice did, rarely, include minor plotlines in which Dell actually showed some aptitude for patient care and some limited autonomy. For instance, although the March 25, 2010 episode was mostly about how amazing the show's physician characters are, Dell did get to deliver a baby by himself in the field. And because he successfully executed a risky maneuver to free the baby, who was stuck in the birth canal, physician Cooper credited Dell with saving two lives! But Dell's exit reminded us of what the show really thought of midwifery and nursing. Don't take our word for it. In the May 24-June 6 issue of TV Guide, show creator Shonda Rhimes explained that Dell was "a midwife in a world of doctors. Babies can only be delivered in so many episodes. Dell got lots of coffee, answered lots of phones." She lauded actor Chris Lowell by noting that "an actor of his caliber should be doing Shakespeare, not handing people charts." In other words, nurses and midwives don't do much of interest, which is why Dell spent so much time doing receptionist work, and why he eventually had to go. But at least he has now gone on to that great medical school in the sky! more...and see video clips from the relevant shows.
August 2, 2010 -- This week The New Yorker ran "Letting Go," a 12,000-word article about end-of-life care by surgeon and health writer Atul Gawande. This "Annals of Medicine" piece is physician-centric, quoting seven physicians and repeatedly implying that physicians are the only health providers whose views and actions really matter on this issue, and more broadly, that physicians direct health care. But the article also includes a surprisingly substantial look at the skilled work of Boston hospice nurse Sarah Creed, as Gawande accompanies her on patient visits and actually relies on some of her account of hospice care, providing a far more substantial look at the nursing role in palliative care than did a long December 2009 New York Times story about sedation of the dying. Gawande's New Yorker piece offers a fairly candid and progressive view of end-of-life care, arguing that people in the U.S. too often approach the final days of life with an expensive heroic treatment model that can needlessly increase suffering and even shorten life. He stresses that careful discussion of patients' end-of-life priorities, though very difficult, seems to be the key to improving this situation (though he notes that recent U.S. health reform efforts to provide funding for such discussions were doomed by claims that they were "death panels"). Gawande does not seem to be aware that nurses, who have a holistic practice model and who have long spent far more time with the dying than any other health professionals, have been pushing just this perspective on end-of-life care for decades. And he consults no nurse as a stand-alone expert on end-of-life care, as he does several physicians; we guess that would be asking too much. But by including Creed, the piece does give nursing serious, sustained attention that is unusual in an elite magazine like this. We commend Gawande and the New Yorker for that. more...
Pregnancy Pact: A movie review
2010 -- Lifetime's The Pregnancy Pact portrays several high school girls who intentionally get pregnant, apparently seduced by fantasies of loving, carefree motherhoods. The movie was "inspired by a true story" and it's a competent made-for-TV issue melodrama, engaging enough if somewhat schematic and bland. Some might also see in the movie a "ripped from the headlines" exploitation of a serious and complex problem, particularly since the film references some events that really happened in Gloucester, Massachusetts, in 2008, but it reportedly invents key story elements. The movie does make a fairly serious effort to explore some basic aspects of teen pregnancy, showing young females who see little future beyond child-rearing. It seems like almost everyone involved here--teens, parents, and community leaders--is lying to someone. The film presents the school nurse as a forceful advocate for better pregnancy prevention, a compassionate professional who takes on the school administration and a "family values" group to try to stem the school's teen pregnancy "epidemic." The nurse might have done some direct counseling of the pregnant students, as a real nurse would. And the character is limited. She never gets at the deeper issues involved in the pregnancies, and she resigns in protest roughly a quarter of the way through the movie, never to reappear. The main force for a more progressive approach to teen pregnancy in the film is actually a relentless young New York video blogger who bonds with the teens and does far more to get to the bottom of the epidemic. Still, the portrayal of the nurse as an articulate professional who is willing to make a big personal sacrifice to advance public health debunks the popular notion that school nurses are just about aspirin and band-aids. And that's especially helpful at a time when U.S. school districts face extraordinary pressure to cut costs. more...
The Truth receives 501(c)(3) status
August 4, 2010 -- Today The Truth About Nursing was notified that it qualifies as a charitable non-profit organization under section 501(c)(3) of the federal tax code. That means donations to the Truth made since its inception at the end of 2008 are tax-deductible as allowed by law. See our 501(c)(3) status letter here. Please make a tax-deductible donation to support our work to improve understanding of nursing today. Thank you!
Get the expanded and updated paperback edition of Saving Lives, with a new foreword by Echo Heron!
May 4, 2010 -- Saving Lives: Why the Media's Portrayal of Nurses Puts Us All at Risk was released today in paperback, with a new foreword by bestselling nurse author Echo Heron! This edition is revised and expanded, discussing Nurse Jackie and the other new nurse shows in detail, and featuring updated information throughout. You can get an author-signed copy of the book when you become a member of the Truth or renew your membership for $30 (click here!). Please help support the Truth's effort to change how the world thinks about nursing today.
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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...
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
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Script for a nurse-centered television drama
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Saving Lives: Why the Media's Portrayal of Nurses Puts Us All at Risk
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Saving Lives: Why the Media's Portrayal of Nurses Puts Us All at Risk
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