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Representation of Nursing in Media

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Submitted By olympiak
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Unfortunately, when it comes to Hollywood as a means of portraying the nursing profession, the media has failed us. The most popular medical dramas such as Grey’s Anatomy and House are physician dominated shows, offering viewers little to no truth about nursing profession. However, all the above shows fail to portray nurses with a positive image; most of the time the role of nurses is being undermined, insulting, or misrepresenting the profession. For example, on the show House, nurses are fairly irrelevant. Nurses are barley background noises; rather, it is the doctors providing direct bedside patient care in the hospital. In my 20 years of experience in nursing, I have never seen doctors spend so much time at the bedside with patient and performing tasks. I have worked in different settings, from a large teaching hospital to a small neighborhood hospital, and not even the interns and residents spend that much time giving direct patient care. For the general public and for the new generation who has not decided as what they want to be in life, this show portrays nursing as standing silently in the back ground. On all of the TV shows, the physician performs critical nursing tasks and this makes the doctors look more heroic and nurses look more incompetent and inessential. In these shows, we do not see nurses interacting with patients, but that is a misrepresentation of the profession, because we all know that nurses are the most in contact and interaction with patients and their families. However, there are some positive media representations of nursing. Have any of you seen the nursing commercial by Johnson and Johnson on TV? It is a very inspiring and heartwarming commercial. The purpose of the advertisement is to recruit more nurses, portraying nurses as compassionate caretakers. The commercial shows that nursing as an important, worthwhile, and fulfilling

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