What Will it Take to Fix the Global Nursing Shortage?

We think it will take the truth.

But to get the truth out there, we need your help.

The world must understand the true value of nursing. When society undervalues nursing, the profession is underfunded. This means short-staffing, which undermines clinical practice and adds to nursing burnout. It means inadequate funding for nursing education. It means our patients pay the price.

Increasing the value we place on nursing starts with examining the profession's image. That image is shaped by influential products from the press, Hollywood, corporate advertisers, and many other sources. Too rarely is it shaped by nurses.

The Center for Nursing Advocacy focuses attention on nursing's image. We educate the public about nursing. This year, our web site had more than one million visitors. We get worldwide press coverage for our issues. We work with those who create nursing's media image. The media consults us for stories about nursing. We try to "catch the media being good." And when needed, we help supporters take effective grassroots action.

But we need your help. There is only so much our small, mostly volunteer staff can do. If we had more resources, we could do so much more to improve the nursing image, including working more proactively with the media. As an independent 501(c)(3) charity, we rely solely on tax-deductible donations from supporters like you.

So we urge you to make a generous year-end donation today! Member levels start at just $25. And it's only $9 for students and new graduates. But if you can donate $100 or more, that would really help. If you donate $250 or more, you are entitled to appear on our major donors list, at the right side of each of our 1,000+ web pages. And you get cool free gifts with each donation!

If you represent an organization, you can have your logo appear on our pages with your donation. Click here for details.

What has the Center done to improve understanding of nursing this year? Here are some examples:

Spreading new ideas about nursing

Just last week we succeeded in getting an op-ed piece published in The Baltimore Sun. The op-ed, by Columbia University nursing professor Kristine Gebbie and Center director Sandy Summers, argues that nurses deserve a Nobel Prize or some comparable annual award. Nurses have changed the world by reinventing health systems, pioneering new therapies, and improving community health, from AIDS treatment to neonatal care to pain management. We think establishing such a prize would shine a light on the profession's life-saving achievements, which would help solve the nursing shortage.

Asking the media and the public to think about nursing and its image

The Heart Attack Grill

News of our recent campaign to persuade Tempe's Heart Attack Grill to omit the "nurse" element of its "naughty nurse" wait staff uniforms has reached around the world. Through coverage on television, radio, print media and the Internet, from CNN to The Times of India, we have highlighted the problems with this image, which can harm nursing recruitment and clinical practice, and inhibit nurses' ability to get the resources they need. In many cases, we have fostered media discussion of problems in clinical practice and the shortage in general.

The Golden Lamp Awards

In January, we released our third annual Golden Lamp Awards, in collaboration with the American Journal of Nursing. The Awards recognize some of the best and worst media depictions of nursing from the prior year. Early this year, the Awards got coverage in US Weekly, The New York Post, All Headline News, Editor & Publisher, and an Internet Broadcasting Systems story that ran on many U.S. television network affiliate websites.

Jack White

In our 2005 Golden Lamp Awards, we recognized a stereotype-laden song by the popular and influential White Stripes as one of the worst portrayals of nursing. We sent group leader Jack White an "award." White responded with a counter-award. Press coverage of this exchange appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Salon, and the Detroit Metro Times.

Asking the corporate world to think about nursing and its image

The Four-Hour Nurse Training Course

Early this year, one of our members alerted us to a new CVS television commercial in which a pharmacist said he had spent four hours of his own time explaining a medication regimen to a patient's husband, which the pharmacist referred to as teaching him how to be "a nurse." We discussed the ad with CVS. The commercial was edited to explain the pharmacist's commendable actions without suggesting nurses get four hours of training.

The "Electronic Nurse"

Recently, ALR Technologies launched a disease management compliance product using the informal name "Electronic Nurse." We contacted ALR about this. A few weeks later, a company representative told us ALR was changing the name. The device is now called the "ALRT500 Compliance Reminder."

More Intensive Care

A couple months ago, Schick launched print ads for its Quattro Titanium razor that featured "naughty nurses" tending to a young man in a hospital bed. The "nurses" were said to be providing "more intensive care." We discussed the ads with Schick representatives. The ads were discontinued.

Spurring Grassroots Action

Recently, the Center launched its new chapters. We now have six U.S. chapters and three in Canada, with more on the way. These chapters will extend our reach into the global community. With more funding, we hope to hire staff to better support and coordinate the chapters.

Why Does It Matter Whether People Understand Nursing?

Nurses are the critical front-line caregivers in health care today. They often make the difference between life and death, self-sufficiency and dependency, hope and despair. You know this! But too many people don't. And that is a factor in the global nursing shortage that has claimed countless lives and threatens to overwhelm our health systems.

Nurses around the world now struggle with short-staffing that kills patients and drives colleagues from the profession. Nursing education is severely underfunded. In the U.S., 150,000 reportedly qualified applicants could not get into nursing school last year. Nursing researchers struggle to find funding for their vital work.

Why is this? One key reason is that few non-nurses, including many of our health care colleagues, really understand what nurses do. This vacuum of knowledge is filled by long-standing social assumptions that are fostered and reinforced by the media.

Research shows that the media has a real effect on the public's health care views and actions. But the media commonly misrepresents nursing, often relying on stereotypes instead of reality. Countless influential health pieces in the news media continue to ignore nursing, or suggest that it consists of menial assistance to physicians.

Meanwhile, entertainment media products tell millions around the world that nurses don't matter. In Hollywood, 28 out of 30 major characters in the top four hospital shows are physicians. Only two characters are nurses. The physician characters spend a great deal of their time doing--and getting credit for--important work that nurses do in real life.

The bottom line: if nursing is seen as lowly "women's work" that's all about getting equipment for physicians and bestowing favors, there is little reason to provide it with many resources, especially in today's severely stressed health financing systems.

The Center's Vision

To help us move toward a world where society really respects nursing--and allocates its resources accordingly--the Center must be able to shape media portrayals in a more proactive and broad-based way. We must do more to:

train and work with those who create media portrayals;
educate the public in more direct and innovative ways;
encourage the media to use nurses as expert sources and advisors;
encourage nurses to create media and speak up about their work.

Help Us

Because of the lack of overall understanding worldwide, nurses must sustain a collective effort to shape media portrayals of their work. We must educate society in order to obtain more social, political and financial support. As Florence Nightingale once said:

In our imperfect state of conscience and enlightenment, publicity and the collision resulting from publicity are the best guardians of the interest of the sick.

The Center's global media monitoring, analysis and advocacy is a huge challenge. It takes extensive research, writing, communication, and Internet efforts. We must pay for office equipment, supplies, transportation, Internet products, insurance, postage and telephone costs. Our office is donated by our staff. And our staff can undertake only a small part of the work that needs to be done to improve nursing's image.

So we urge you to make a year-end donation to help us continue and expand our work. Just click here to learn about the great gifts you can receive for joining or renewing your Center membership, including our cool t-shirts and the Archie McPhee nurse action figure! It's quick and easy! And because the Center is a 501(c)(3) charity, your gift is tax-deductible as allowed by law.

Thank you for all of your support over the past year. You are the reason we've had a real impact on public understanding of nursing worldwide. Together, we can strengthen nursing, and give patients the kind of health care they deserve in 2007 and beyond!

Sandy Summers, RN, MSN, MPH
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
ssummers@nursingadvocacy.org

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