Documenti di Didattica
Documenti di Professioni
Documenti di Cultura
LIVES
WHY
THE MEDIA’S
PORTRAYAL
OF NURSES PUTS
US ALL
AT RISK
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Aimee Mann
from “Invisible Ink”
Lost in Space (2002)
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xi
Part One:
Dangerous Ignorance:
Why Our Understanding of Nursing Matters . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
1. Who Are Nurses and Where Have They Gone? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
A Few Notes on Nursing History ◆ The Nursing Shortage
Part Two:
The Great Divide: The Media versus Real Nursing . . . . . . . . . . . . 53
3. Could Monkeys Be Nurses? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55
Media Portrayals of Nurses as Serious Professionals ◆ “Is This All
Nurses Do?” Media Contempt for Nursing Skill ◆ If It’s Impor-
tant Work, Credit Anyone but a Nurse ◆ Ghosts in the Machine:
Nurses Go Missing in the Media ◆ Can Any Helpful Person or
Thing Be a Nurse?
Part Three:
Seeking Better Understanding of Nursing —
and Better Health Care . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 247
10. How We Can All Improve Understanding of Nursing . . . . . . 249
I’m a Citizen of the World. What Can I Do? ◆ I’m a Member of
the Media. What Can I Do? ◆ I’m a Private Sector Health Care
Executive. What Can I Do? ◆ I’m a Government or Health Policy
Maker. What Can I Do? ◆ I’m a Health Worker but Not a Nurse.
What Can I Do?
Acknowledgments. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 313
EndNotes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 315
References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 327
Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 337
Nurses save lives every day. But the media usually ignores
their vital role in health care.
In 2005 U.S. Army Sergeant Tony Wood was riding in a Hum-
vee in Iraq. A roadside bomb exploded. Metal tore into Wood’s inter-
nal organs. A month later he woke up at Walter Reed Army Medical
Center in Washington, DC. Wood first saw his wife — and asked
what she was doing in Iraq. Wood’s story appeared in an August
2008 New York Times article by Lizette Alvarez about traumatic
brain injuries in combat veterans. Once Woods arrived at a hospital,
expert nurses led the 24/7 effort that helped him survive, as they do
with any patient whose injuries are so severe. But here is how Alvarez
summed up that effort: “Doctors patched up most of his physical
wounds over five months.”
In a similar incident, a roadside bomb blew up near a Humvee in
which U.S. Army Sergeant Nick Paupore was riding in Kirkuk City.
Paupore lost his leg and an enormous amount of blood, but he too
survived. In March 2008 the CNN website posted a story by Saun-
dra Young about a Walter Reed neurologist’s use of a promising new
mirror therapy to help amputees like Paupore cope with phantom
limb pain. Once again, nurses no doubt provided the great majority
of the care that helped Paupore survive. But in describing the care
Paupore received in Germany on his way to Walter Reed, the article
reported simply that “doctors fought to save his life.”
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Saving Lives explores what the public is told about the nurses who
are fighting to save your life. We focus on the most universal source
of public information: the media. We wrote the book to expand
upon our work for the Center for Nursing Advocacy, a nonprofit
organization dedicated to improving public understanding of nurs-
ing. Sandy and other graduate nursing students at Johns Hopkins
founded the Center in 2001. Sandy had practiced nursing for fifteen
years in emergency and critical care units at leading trauma centers
in Washington, DC, San Francisco, and New Orleans. Sandy’s hus-
band Harry, a lawyer and media junkie, agreed to help the Center stir
things up. Many nurses, nurse educators, and advocates rely on us to
monitor and analyze what the media is doing, to advocate for more
accurate portrayals of nursing, and to act as a resource for media
creators with an interest in what nurses really do. We often use an
approach we have called “entertainment advocacy,” which aims to
stimulate thinking in some of the same ways the media itself does,
including irreverent and satirical elements.
Our advocacy has had a real impact on media creators. We have
persuaded major corporations to reconsider advertising campaigns
that relied on nursing stereotypes, such as a global Skechers campaign
featuring Christina Aguilera as a “naughty nurse.” We have helped
companies rework ad campaigns to avoid nursing stereotypes. We per-
suaded the U.S. government to revise the name of an annual minority
health care campaign to one that would not exclude the nurses who
actually provide much of that care. News stories about our advocacy
have appeared on major television networks and in print sources from
the Los Angeles Times to the Times of India. And even Hollywood has
reacted, grudgingly, to our analysis of its poor portrayal of nursing.
We interact with producers, and some of them have been receptive to
our concerns and advice, though far more needs to be done.
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Nurses are the critical front-line caregivers in health care. For mil-
lions of people worldwide, nurses are the difference between life and
death, self-sufficiency and dependency, hope and despair. Yet a lack
of true appreciation for nursing has contributed to a shortage that is
one of our most urgent public health crises. Many nurses feel that
they’ve written in invisible ink, that their hard work is not under-
stood, and the result is a lack of resources. The shortage of nurses is
overwhelming the world’s health systems. It is no exaggeration to say
that our future depends on a better understanding of nursing.
Changing the way the world thinks about nursing may require
a superhuman effort. But as the philosopher Albert Camus once
wrote, “tasks are called superhuman when humans take a long time
to complete them, that is all. The first thing is not to despair.”
We can do it — if you help.
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