The Continuing Invisibility of Nurses in the Media
Nurse Jackie aside, how visible are nurses in the media today?
Nurse Jackie was supposed to put nurses “on the map” in the sense of portraying the real world of nursing. After all, here was a modern, gutsy, “take no guff” nurse who stood her ground and stood up for patients. (Sure, she had a drug problem, traded sex for drugs, and her marriage came apart—but one can’t have everything.) At least, there was a nurse character on television who wasn’t relegated to only saying “Yes, doctor,” or standing silently behind an OR mask.
The show portrayed a dynamic, compellingly complex nurse character. But what did the show, or what could any such fictional drama, do to change how people think about nurses and their place and value in health care? It certainly didn’t change the media’s thinking—in 2018, reporters rarely consider getting nurses’ views on stories about health care.
The 1998 Woodhull Study on Nursing and the Media: ‘dismal’ results.
In 1998, Sigma Theta Tau International commissioned a study—the Woodhull Study on Nursing and the Media—to examine how the media portrayed nursing. (You can read AJN’s summary (free until May 28) of the study in the December 1998 issue.) The results were dismal—after examining over 20,000 articles in newspapers and magazines, the researchers found that nurses were mentioned in only four percent of articles about health care.
