Nurses Find Media Image Needs Intensive Care

The Center for Nursing Advocacy has announced its fourth "Golden Lamp Awards," the group's annual list of the best and worst media portrayals of nurses. The 2006 list includes a range of media from all over the world.

[ClickPress, Wed Jan 10 2007] The Center for Nursing Advocacy has announced its fourth "Golden Lamp Awards," the group's annual list of the best and worst media portrayals of nurses. The 2006 list includes a range of media from all over the world.

Among the "worst" award recipients were the Nobel Prize-winning Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders), Italian political leader Silvio Berlusconi, nurse recruiting campaigner Johnson & Johnson, and hit Hollywood shows including ABC's "Grey's Anatomy" and Fox's "House."

"Most of the best depictions of nursing appeared in the print media," said Center Executive Director Sandy Summers, who cited specific pieces in the The Philadelphia Daily News, The New Yorker, and Bangladesh's Daily Star as being among the best. Summers also praised nursing scholars and advocates who had made an impact in the general media, and many companies, including Wynn Las Vegas, drug chain CVS, and ALR Technologies, for promptly modifying damaging images in their products or ads.

The Center noted that, as usual, many of the least accurate and most damaging depictions were in the influential television medium. Besides "Grey's Anatomy" and "House," the Center's "worst" list included episodes of NBC's "ER" and "Heroes," and HBO's "The Sopranos."

"'Grey's Anatomy' and 'House' are the worst offenders," Summers said. "These globally popular shows portray nurses as brainless servants, while heroic physicians provide all important care -- much of which nurses do in real life, like defibrillation, triage and patient education. With a nursing crisis stemming in large part from undervaluation of the profession, this is unacceptable."

On the other hand, the Center gave "Honorable Mention" awards to two episodes of NBC's "Scrubs," and to the Australian dramatic series "Remote Area Nurse." And it cited a massive TIME magazine cover story on hospital risks as being one of the worst for ignoring nursing.

Berlusconi received an "Evolutionary Dead End" award for telling the press that his own Cleveland Clinic nurses were less attractive than Italian nurses. The Center's "worst" list also cited Médecins Sans Frontières for refusing to consider a slight name change to credit the nurses and others who do most of its work; Johnson & Johnson for recruiting commercials that reinforced handmaiden and emotional "angel" stereotypes; and Mattel for selling a doll called the "Nurse Quacktitioner," which suggested that nurse practitioners are quacks.

See the Center's annual year-end awards in summary version:
http://www.nursingadvocacy.org/press/releases/golden/2006/sum.html
or full version
http://www.nursingadvocacy.org/press/releases/golden/2006/awd.html

The Center congratulates those responsible for items on the "best" and "honorable mention" lists, and it encourages continued strong efforts from them. The Center thanks those who have made efforts to remedy their damaging portrayals of nurses. The Center is also reaching out to those responsible for items on the "worst" list, in the hope that it can help them improve their treatment of nursing issues in 2007.

Summers noted that some of the best accounts of nursing were created by nurses themselves, or by journalists who consulted nursing experts. "This points to the importance of nurses speaking out strongly and frequently about their profession," she said. She added that this year the Center has seen an impressive number of nurses across the world advocating in the media for their patients and themselves.

The Center for Nursing Advocacy, founded in 2001, is a Baltimore-based non-profit that seeks to increase public understanding of the central, front-line role nurses play in modern health care. The focus of the Center is to promote more accurate, balanced and frequent media portrayals of nurses and increase the media's use of nurses as expert sources. See more about the Center on our about us page.

For more information on the 2006 awards, see the full version of our awards:
http://www.nursingadvocacy.org/press/releases/golden/2006/awd.html

or contact:

Sandy Summers, MSN, MPH, RN
Executive Director
The Center for Nursing Advocacy
203 Churchwardens Rd.
Baltimore, MD, USA 21212-2937
office 1-410-323-1100
fax 1-443-705-0260
cell 1-443-253-3738
ssummers@nursingadvocacy.org
www.nursingadvocacy.org


The URL for this page is www.nursingadvocacy.org/press/releases/golden/2006/rel.html
© 2003-2006 The Center for Nursing Advocacy, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

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