When the public conjures up the image of a nurse, what is it? The TV nurses of "General Hospital" have spent most of their "careers" standing around the telephone, chatting at the nurse's station and saying, "Yes doctor, you are correct," when a doctor breezed through the scene. Most television or magazine interviews regarding health care in america are from a physician's perspective, never understanding the complexities and intellect of the nursing profession. Many individuals still see nurses as selfless women who empty bedpans and straighten bed sheets, and do exactly what the doctor says.
When asked to think of a nurse in the movies, many likely still think of Nurse Ratched in "One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” The character, played by Louise Fletcher, has become almost synonymous with the disciplinarian medical professional—a crazy nurse whose unyielding worldview and sadism, when unchecked, could provoke a homicidal meltdown in her emotionally regressed patients. From Nurse Ratched to Hotlips Houlihan, and recently Nurse Betty the portrayal of nurses in the media, as sadistic, sex-starved, selfless, delusional women continues to hinder our profession.
Most people probably don't think the average nurse goes to work in lingerie, looking for sex. But the fusing of lingerie with nurses' work uniforms in popular media images, and the exposure of sexy nurses’ bodies in these images, still associates the profession with sex in the public mind. In the late 1980s, the American Nurses Association protested the NBC show "Nightingales," which portrayed its professionals as nubile sex kittens, said Anne Hudson Jones, Ph.D., a professor of literature and medicine at the at the of at .
The Center for Nurse Advocacy’s report; one U.K. study found nursing one of the most sexually fantasized about jobs. In 2007, Cadbury Schweppes ran "naughty nurse" television ads for Dentyne Ice chewing gum. The ads show female nurses being lured into bed with male patients the instant the men pop the gum in their mouths. The tag line was, “Get Fresh." They use naughty nurse imagery to sell products to young men—a cliché in itself. And they suggest that use of the products by hospital patients will instantly produce an erotic reaction from the always available bedside nurse.
The April 25, 2007, Today's Baltimore Sun featured a column by Laura Vozzella about a poll taken by firefighters on thewatchdesk.com that asked which local hospital had the "hottest" nurses. Vozzella's piece suggests that this is a curious way for at least 146 responding firefighters to be spending their time, given that the department has recently been criticized for a fatal training exercise and that unions are calling for its chief to resign. But she also explains why nurses might have a problem with the poll's implied suggestion that they are all about sexiness. Vozzella's column is "Forget the chief—did you see that nurse?" Vozzella explores what the poll might mean for nurses. She notes that the enduring "naughty nurse" image the poll feeds suggests that nurses are "some sort of in-hospital prostitutes."
One might argue that people don’t believe what they see in the movies, or read in newspapers, I disagree, as even humor and fantasy images affect the way people view nurses.
With nursing shortages acute enough to warrant congressional attention, some organizations have turned their attention to image. Nurse advocates say that negative images have started to prove costly, especially the idea of a nurse as a technical professional who only works with her hands, crippled by an inability to take the lead, and control sexual desires. Suggesting nurses are primarily sex objects in turn, conveys the idea that nursing work consists of satisfying the sexual needs of patients and/or physicians, or at best, that nursing is so unimportant that nurses have the time and energy to focus on sex while supposedly caring for patients.
The portrayal of our profession is downright inaccurate. And doesn’t really help our cause. What do you think?