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.

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2018-05-14T13:18:47-04:00May 14th, 2018|healthcare social media, Nursing|3 Comments
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Wabi-Sabi: Nursing and the Art of Brokenness

Wabi-Sabi (Kintsugi), watercolor and acrylic on paper, 2018 by Julianna Paradisi

Nursing is the art of healing, which ironically also makes it an art of brokenness. We pack and bind wounds. We administer medications to cure disease. We offer interventions for the side effects caused by the medication administered to cure.

We work in a health care system which, despite our best intentions, is broken: not enough resources, not enough staff or providers, not enough health care to go around for everyone.

Nurses have broken areas within ourselves too, but our work environments expect us to perform as perfectly as possible, amidst the brokenness of our patients, the brokenness of health care.

Patients, physicians, other departments, and hospital administrators expect nurses will fix problems, whatever they are, despite the brokenness.

A timely example this flu season is the paradoxical message: “Don’t come to work sick,” coupled with the implication, “Your sick call leaves us understaffed.”

The answer to brokenness is wholeheartedness.

The effort to fix the brokenness or imperfection of nursing and health care may be particularly exhausting for nurses because we are directly responsible for the safety of our patients.

The words of author David Whyte as he recounts a wise friend’s advice elegantly […]

2018-02-14T10:05:33-05:00February 14th, 2018|healthcare social media, Nursing, nursing perspective|0 Comments
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How to Identify and Avoid Predatory Journals

Photo by Alice Rosen, via Flickr.

I remember receiving my first “accept” letter for a novel I was working on many years ago. In my excitement, I didn’t stop to think that it was strange that, before the editor began working with me, I would have to pay a large sum of money to get the manuscript into shape. When my euphoria died down and my skepticism shot up, I decided to submit a fake query to the same publisher, highlighting a novel that could never possibly get published. Imagine my dismay when I received the exact same acceptance letter.

So in a way, predatory publishing is not an entirely new concept. And in fact, many more or less legitimate self-publishing options for books, fiction or otherwise, still exist. But with the increasing dominance of the Web and the rise of the open access movement—established to help spread publicly funded research—a more invidious and widely pervasive form of predatory publishing has taken hold in scholarly publishing. And the stakes are far higher. While my novel probably wasn’t going to affect anyone’s life, articles published by unscrupulous publishers—especially medical and nursing literature—have a lot more power to cause damage.

Flawed, unreliable content.

Since predatory journals often forego rigorous […]

2018-01-19T10:56:23-05:00January 19th, 2018|digital health, nursing research, writing|0 Comments
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Tallying Losses and Gains of Being a Nurse, and Finding Profit

I was talking with a dear friend who was telling me how she went through a period when she had wondered whether nursing was destroying her. I can’t say what she actually meant by this for her own self, but the comment stood out to me. I found myself chewing on this notion that we can feel slowly worn down by the overall experience of nursing to a point where we feel the losses are not being offset by the gains quickly enough.

A certain loss of innocence.

Given all of the random tragedy, self-sabotage, and violence that nurses may witness in their patients’ stories, nurses can experience the loss of a more innocent, optimistic perspective about people and the world. Nurses often say there are things you cannot “un-see” in this line of work. Those experiences can darken the lens through which we see the world. The loss of faith in the assured wellness in the world can feel disheartening. It can be difficult to know how to process this in a way that does not simply leave us more fearful or cynical people.

The energy drain.

On a less philosophical level, it […]

2018-01-18T10:04:58-05:00January 5th, 2018|healthcare social media, Nursing, writing|2 Comments
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The Top 10 AJN Blog Posts of 2017

As is our tradition in the final weeks of the calendar year, we’d like to share the 10 most popular AJN blog posts of 2017. Most of these posts are by nurses who somehow find time to write in the midst of busy nursing and personal lives. One or two are by AJN editors. Not all, but most, are written by nurses.

What are the posts about? A few discuss aspects of notable health care topics covered by AJN in the past year. But most tell stories from personal experience or explore issues of importance to nurses in their careers. The nurse’s daily enounter with the physical and emotional needs of patients is a frequent subtext, as might be expected.

How to Support the Nurse in Your Life
“A job this intense isn’t so easily contained in a separate professional box. For nurses to live healthier, more integrated lives, we need space for our experience, and this is how our friends and family can help.”

A Nurse Takes a Stand—and Gets Arrested
“Nurses everywhere can draw inspiration from Alex Wubbels and her confidence and use the incident as a lens for self-reflection on our own behavior in difficult circumstances—and as a model for how to behave in the future.”

A Closer Look at the […]

2017-12-18T10:09:30-05:00December 18th, 2017|healthcare social media, narratives, Nursing|0 Comments
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Views expressed on the blog are solely those of the authors or persons quoted. They do not necessarily reflect AJN’s views or those of Wolters Kluwer Health/Lippincott Williams and Wilkins.
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