Media is an important channel for health care system to create awareness of health issue and about nursing professions to the society. In older days peoples listened to radio and read newspaper for the meaningful purposes like weather forecast and news around the world. In present generation media generates public awareness through telecommunication Satellites TV, Internet and movies etc. I agreed that the media depicted positives and negatives influence regarding nurses’ images to the public and overall more on negatives aspect of it. Nurses consist as the largest professional workforce to the healthcare industry.
The Hollywood plays a major role in creating health awareness because millions of peoples in United States and worldwide watch the movies and TV show. Unfortunately the Hollywood movies or TV shows often portray nurses as less educated, less professional and less essential in clinical field and gives importance to physicians. For instance, the daily routine care that are perform by nurses are broadcasted in the show as the task of the physicians, taking vital sings, administering medications and starting drips. In real world all this activities are perform by nurses at patient’s bedside.
This could be one of the reasons that the public has wrong impressions about nursing profession. That it had become at times a source of mockery to some extent of degrading the profession to a level of being sexist, imbued with profanity as media depicts. However the modern professional nurses are educated at the baccalaureate, master and doctorate level and work in different areas of education, research and independent clinical practice as well. Although there are negative images of nursing being portrayed by Media. Recently we have seen more positives images of nurses shown in media.
Johnson & Johnson is one of the well know company in the world, supports nurses, by conducting campaign on nurses annually to raise public awareness of professional nurse. With this company, nursing penetrated the business community, which will be another avenue in educating the general public on the role and scope of nursing. This company has taken another big step to recognize the dedicated nurses who responded to national crisis such as hurricane Katrina, which happened in the year 2005.
Nina pam, survivor from the outbreak of deadly Ebola virus was invited to see the president of U. S.in appreciation of her compassionate and job well done. Another avenue would be the recent movie “The American Nurse” is a documentary regarding the lives of five specialty nurses and the differences that they made everyday in the lives of others, this was directed and written by the award- winning, film-maker Caroline Jones.
As a cancer survivor herself today, she proactively dedicated her profession to direct the lens of her camera to shine its light to the oldest vocation; that is nursing. Very few had been said true to the nursing profession, that most frequently it is the most misunderstood and unrecognized job beyond ideal.
Other avenues would be educating the peoples in the community and patients in hospital or clinics, making them aware that helping peoples is a challenge, which requires courage, willpower and patience. To conclude, though media is ignorant to the fact that behind every doctor’s success is a nurse, living in a country with freedom of speech, the viewers have a right to complaint if nursing profession is inaccurately portray by media. Nursing doesn’t stop even when the lights was turned off but still continues 24/7 round the clock, and maybe until we stop believing in serving and loving others that the profession is founded for.