From Silence to Voice, a Book Report Essay

The Institute of Medicine’s (IOM) publication Keeping Patients Safe: Transforming the Work Environment of Nurses (2004) delineated a patient safety issue related to nurse staffing. A postanesthesia care unit (PACU) nurse caring for five patients received report telephonically for an admission from the emergency room (ER). The PACU nurse did not want to accept the patient immediately and requested additional time to stabilize her current patients and finish completing charting from a previous admission. The ER nurse said the ER was busy and she would have the patient in the PACU in five minutes before she hung up the phone. The PACU nurse notified her supervisor who agreed to “look around” for an additional nurse to help, but she advised the PACU nurse that if she refused this admission she would be written up. The

Media has an immense effect on societal views, and cultural norms. It is not surprising then, that media influences the public view of the nursing profession (McHugh, 2012). Negative portrayal of nursing in media is detrimental, these stereotypes undermine the profession which leads to less resources and a negative image of nursing among nursing students (Anonymous, 2010). For these reasons the image of nursing in media is something that needs to be explored, to understand how the nursing image in media affects both public and personal perception of the profession (Anonymous, 2010). Nurse Jackie is a controversial television show about an Emergency room nurse named Jackie (Hudis & Zisk, 2009). In this series Jackie is middle aged, married, mother of two, and while she is depicted as being loving with her family, she is having an affair with the pharmacist for her department. As a nurse Jackie is caring, and compassionate towards her patients, while also exhibiting unethical and inappropriate behaviours both within and outside of her working environment (Sorrell, 2009). Jackie is a complex character who exhibits both positive and negative nursing behaviours.

Nursing as a profession is often portrayed by the media in demeaning ways. “Nurses have often been unfairly and unrealistically portrayed as “battle axes” or psychologically compromised. And that’s if they are written into the script at all.” (Berkowitz, 2014). “They are often portrayed as physician helpers, not the highly skilled independent clinicians that we know they are.” (Berkowitz, 2014).

The media and Hollywood in particular, represent one avenue in which the general public becomes familiar with the role of nurses. How do the media positively or negatively influence the public’s image of nursing? What other avenues may better educate the general public on the role and scope of nursing as well as the changing health care system?

Professional nurses are as important, in achieving success, as any other component within the healthcare sector. For instance, a professional nurse typically spends more time in direct contact with patients than a physician does (Hendrich et al., 2008). Nevertheless, media sources have always painted the picture of a nurse in various forms. Although nurses are sometimes perceived as life savers and angels of mercy, the profession is often sexualized, stereotyped, and undermined in its importance (Hoeve et al., 2014). In this paper I will describe how the media portrays a professional nurse, and compare it with the current knowledge in literature –searched through a professional search engine, CINAHL. Then I will provide an insight into

In reading through various journal articles on the subject, I see how important it is for nurses to get involved in the political process. Nurses can sometimes get so focused on their job of taking care of their patients, that they fail to get involved with political matters. Nurses are great at advocating for their patients but many of them are just not prepared to voice their concerns publicly about staffing and funding shortages and also for patient’s safety (O'Connor, 2014). Nurses do have a lot of potential in contributing to the political process by participating in professional nursing organizations or through policy committees in the workplace. “To be successful

Advocacy is the active support of an idea or cause expressed through strategies and methods that influence the opinions and decisions of people and organizations (Buckley, n.d). Professional nurses have a long history of struggling to deliver patient care against multiple barriers, including dwindling resources. As we speed into the current century, the struggle is increasing in complexity. This struggle affects not only individual nurses, but also patients, organizations, and the nursing profession. Nurses’ strong commitment to patient care and their role as patient advocates often places them in direct conflict with administrators of health care organizations (Green & Jordan, 2004).

D., & Graham, A. C. (2011). Preparing the future nursing workforce for political activism. I-Manager's Journal on Nursing, 1(2), 18-23. Retrieved from

Individuals involved in political action are often looked at as advocates, moreover, nurses specifically have a role in advocating for the marginalized, disenfranchised, and vulnerable populations. The impact nursing has on political action dates back to “the 1960s and 1970s with the push for women’s rights and issues surrounding consumer rights” (Mason, et al., 2016, p. 31). Nurses became known as advocates for their patients which physicians interpreted to going against what they felt to be in the best interest of the patient’s health. The nurses were not carrying out the orders physicians gave, stating they were advocating for their patients. With the movement of nurses advocating for their patients, that opened the doors for an opportunity where nurses could begin practicing autonomously and establishing nursing as a profession. Some states have gone so far as to defining, within their nurse practice act, how nurses will advocate for their patients, nursing, and the health care field (Mason, et al., 2016, p. 32). Quality of a great advocate include, feeling empathy towards the patient, situation, or issue. As you learn to empathize, you become passionate about the situation and/or issue (e.g. health disparity), thus becoming engaged in the situation. As nurses, we are extremely passionate about what we do. This leads us to tap into our moral compass and how we identify with the patient, situation, or

The nurse’s on any ICU are under an enormous amount of stress to add to it I learned today that each day nurse has a day where they are in charge of responding to all the codes. The nurse I shadowed today was Nicole. She showed me a lot of what I learned last semester and helped put it into perspective for me. She first taught me that no matter what ALWAYS take report at the bedside. She taught me her whole routine: take report, adjusts her parameters, she would suction if need, always ensure there is an ambu bag and suction working in the room and ensure all the alarms work then document. We had two patients on the floor the first was post-op day three and the second patient was a CIWA patient. The first patient we checked was the CIWA

You brought up a very important message that I believe is the cause of patient harm, nurse dissatisfaction, and administration dissatisfaction. Communication between the different units of the hospital, as well as with administration is not the focus. Through-put times are the major focus at this time, and another way to withhold payment to the healthcare facilities. The focus being on how fast one can move a patient and patient satisfaction scores have further hindered the ability of even the best working hospital to provide care. While administration is pushing nurses to transfer the patients out of the emergency department (ED) to admission beds, the nurses are taking care of other emergency room patients. The key word is emergency.

Nurses should increase their visibility through ongoing education and an exigent work environment where they are encouraged to assert themselves. One point the authors brought up was how nurses should create enhanced use of their considered positions as case managers, nurse educators, and clinical nurse specialists so they’re able to demonstrate their professionalism to the public allowing nurses actual work to be revealed (Hoeve, Jansen, & Roodbol, 2013, p. 295). This was the one part of the article that did not surprise me. It did not astonish me because since I’ve been in school I’ve realized that nurses today compared to nurses decades ago are furthering their education to make a difference in their workplaces and within the communities, they live in. Now, I don’t mean that years ago nurses didn’t advocate for these types of situations but simply that their voices weren’t able to be heard as well as today. I believe that when we start out as students we are timid and not as divergent, but as we progress into competent sophisticated nurses we are truly able to inflict the positive image we so deserve, but only we can “be the change we wish to see in the world” (Mahatma

The nursing profession is one of many portrayed by the media. In its simplest form media is how information is shared and stored. Media covers a wide range of services, advertisements, brochures, pamphlets, TV shows, films, novels, and magazines, digital, electronic, it goes on and on. Media is more accessible these days; the internet and wireless technology makes it easy for many people to access information on a wide scale. As information is shared by the media the public creates an image. This image may be right or it can be wrong, it all depends on the media’s accuracy. Nurses have been depicted in many forms over the years. These depictions can influence the public’s opinion of the profession as well as the likelihood that the profession will be considered for future students. Nurses need to take a more active role in how the profession is portrayed by the media, they need to work together to portray the profession in its best light in order to recruit and retain nurses.

Nurses may use workarounds with the best of intentions; they may need to get a task done in a minimal time frame. Getting a medication to a patient quickly or providing more efficient care for multiple patients can make the difference between death and saving a life. For example; a patient having a cardiac arrest, needs immediate medical attention and is a time sensitive matter. Getting critical

I’m not sure. The careless man who took my sister, or my ex best friend who took my boyfriend. The death of a sister cranking on my heart, as when my dog attacked a rabbit and the life ended in my hands. My support system crashed like a sports car smashing into an “Oversized Load” on the highway. The glow of the clock tells me it’s far past my bedtime, while the radio broadcaster mumbles something about black friday sales. The driver of the vehicle blurring into the car, my tears blurring everything in sight. When I needed a friend the most, they all seemed to fade away. Nothing but dead still silence surrounds and engulfs me. I should have screamed. Someone should have done something, said something.