Dear Media (newspapers, TV, and movies):

Found this little gem on the web and thought it worth posting here.  Make no mistake about it; the media portrayal of nurses is killing people. 


A Letter to Hollywood:
Nurses Are Not Handmaidens
Laura A. Stokowski, RN, MS Posted: 03/12/2010

Dear Hollywood,

We, the nurses of the world, have something to say to you. Nurses are not what you think. Nurses are independent, highly educated, and skilled healthcare experts who save lives every single day. We work hard and are dedicated to making differences in people's lives. And we are really sick of going home after a 12-hour shift, turning on the television, and seeing ourselves depicted as brainless bimbos. This has been going on far too long, and it has to stop.

The Clown Took a Job as a Nurse

I remember a time when I was in nursing school, watching TV with my roommate, Liz. A skit came on, in which a famous comedienne of the day was dressed up like a clown. For some reason the clown had to leave the circus. "So," said the narrator, "the clown took a job as a nurse." We laughed at the absurdity of this, but I never forgot it.

We were in the middle of a demanding 4-year nursing program, and the suggestion that anyone, even a clown, could be a nurse, just like that, was wounding. I think it was then that I began to take notice of how Hollywood represents nurses. The answer is...badly. But it isn't just disrespect that comes through in Hollywood portrayals -- it's contempt, and it's not at all subtle. You scorn us in the way you pigeonhole nurses on the small screen -- it seems that we're either half-wits, nymphomaniacs, or latter-day Nurse Ratcheds. Obviously, you have no concept of nurses as autonomous, knowledgeable professionals.

We work alongside physicians, but we are their colleagues, not their subordinates. Yet in every hospital drama, physician characters are ordering nurses around, treating them like uneducated servants, or performing nursing care themselves and getting the credit for it, while the nurse characters just fade from view. I can almost hear your reaction to my complaints. There, there, dear, don't take it personally, it's harmless, it's funny. Is it, really? Will it still be harmless or funny one day in the future when you are in the hospital and you press your nurse-call button and no one responds? Or it is answered -- eventually -- by a minimally trained hospital "technician"? The nursing shortage will have reduced our ranks considerably, and driven many of us into early retirement.

It doesn't help the situation when schoolchildren and teens already discount the notion of becoming nurses because of the way nurses are portrayed on Grey's Anatomy. Becoming a nurse, they believe, is a waste of their talents.[1] Maybe You're Misinformed I'm going to give those in Hollywood the benefit of the doubt, and assume that they just have the wrong impression of nurses, and have no idea what nurses really do. But for the non-nurse readers, we'll pretend that you are in the hospital, and you've just had emergency heart surgery.


Who do you suppose will be at your side, watching your blood pressure, making sure you don't go into shock?

Who will be alert for the slightest hint of life-threatening hemorrhage?

Who will respond in mere seconds if your heart begins to beat irregularly?

Who will make sure that your chest tube doesn't get blocked and cause you to go into cardiac arrest?

Who will keep the circulation moving in your lower legs so you a clot doesn't develop and you don't die from a pulmonary embolism?

Who will be constantly watching to make sure that you don't stop breathing, that you are getting enough oxygen, that postoperative pneumonia is not developing?

Who will relieve your pain before you even have to ask?

Who will explain everything that is happening to you and teach you how to take care of yourself after you go home?

I'll give you a hint -- it's not your physician. It is your nurses. They will see you safely through one of the most dangerous times of your life, doing all these things and more. And just so we're clear, I'll tell you what your nurses won't be doing. They won't be clustered around the nurses' station as though at a cocktail party, flirting with physicians. They won't be in the broom closet or the stairwell or behind the patient's curtain giving sexual favors. They won't be trailing after the physician as he marches down the hall, in case he needs a cup of coffee or someone to dump on.

Nor will they be in the receptionist's chair, moaning about not being able to get into medical school. If these scenes sound a little familiar -- I'm not surprised. This is how nurses are regularly portrayed on television dramas. No Angels of Mercy, Please Hollywood, we're not asking you to glorify nurses. Don't turn us into heroes or martyrs. We just want to be accorded the respect, the esteem that our education, status, and profession warrant. We want our dignity back. We don't want the entire world to think of us as sleazy, dim-witted underlings. We want to erase the image of the "naughty nurse" -- this is your bizarre fantasy, not ours. We want young, impressionable children to view nursing as a viable, respected, and even admired profession, one they would be proud to call their own. But most of all, we want our patients to trust us and value our knowledge, so that when we teach them how to become healthier people and live longer, healthier lives, they will listen. This, our most treasured ability -- the core of nursing -- is what you threaten with your cheap attempts to increase ratings by ridiculing the nursing profession.

So my question to you is, is it worth it? Is the money you make from entertaining viewers with mentally unbalanced, sexually promiscuous, or idiotically subservient nurse characters worth influencing potentially hundreds of thousands of young men and women to shun a career in nursing? Will you feel content, even proud, the next time you encounter a nurse, in the thought that you regularly chip away at her self-respect and her ability to be effective in her job? Or will you infuse some realism into your tired stereotypes? You can start by discarding the following myths -- their demise is long overdue.

Myths About Nurses Perpetuated by Hollywood and Other Uninformed Media

1. Physicians are nurses' superiors in the hospital hierarchy- nurses "work for" physicians. Not true. Nursing is a separate, autonomous profession. We work with, not for physicians. We have our own leaders, and we regulate, license, and manage ourselves. Nurses decide what nurses do, not physicians.

2. Nursing doesn't require much education. Nursing education is highly specialized, intense, and rigorous, because nursing itself is a profession grounded in science. Many people, if they believe nurses go to college at all, think that most nurses attend a brief 1- or 2-year program. In fact, 58% of nurses presently have a bachelor's degree or higher, a number that is growing every year. The "2year" nursing program doesn't really exist - the associate's degree in nursing requires prerequisites even before entering the nursing program, making it essentially a 3-year program. And in many areas, new graduate nurses undergo extended fellowships in the clinical setting that greatly increase their education and skill in nursing as they enter the profession.

 3. Nurses mainly "fetch things" for physicians. Nursing is a practice that is unique and distinct from medicine. Nursing is the protection, promotion, and optimization of health and abilities, prevention of illness and injury, alleviation of suffering through the diagnosis and treatment of human response, and advocacy in the care of individuals, families, communities, and populations.[2] Nursing's focus, and what sets it apart from medicine, is the whole person, not just the specific, presenting health problem, and nursing encompasses both actual and potential health problems. Nursing's scope of practice has been shown in numerous studies to save lives and improve health outcomes.

4. Nurses are those who aren't smart enough to get into medical school.
This might be the most irritating myth of all. It presupposes that nursing is just a tiny subset of medicine, a fallback for people who can't quite make it up the ladder. However, nursing is a different profession, not the same profession watered or dumbed down.

Read more here: http://www.tcorn.org/stokowski.pdf

And check this out if you can:  How the media portrayal of Nurses is killing thousands of people every year.  Not only is the public' s view of nursing completely warped, but the managers who run our hospitals are under the influence of these media stereotypes also.   This is why we don't ahve enough real nurses to care for the patient's on our wards.  And this is why the few real nurse's we have are forced to do everyone's elses job as a money saving exercise by the powers that be.



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