The 2022 Nursing in the Media Awards

The Truth About Nursing announces our list of the best and worst media portrayals of nursing for 2022! We regret that transitions this past year again delayed these awards. The year 2022 featured generally strong portrayals of nursing skill and autonomy from veteran television dramas Call the Midwife (BBC/PBS) (our 1st place winner) and Virgin River (Netflix), as well as the Disney+ animated series Baymax! (yes, the “robot nurse”). The year also included some great media advocacy from Pope Francis, who continued his efforts to honor nurses who have saved his life, and Samantha Bee, who devoted one of Full Frontal‘s last segments to the nurse staffing crisis (our 3rd place winner). Some of the best news and social media items involved nurses speaking out about ongoing challenges to nursing as the Covid crisis receded. Among the nursing leaders creating powerful media were Marion Leary, Tyler Kuhk, Christina NP, Theresa Brown, Robin Cogan, Sarah Warren, and Julie McFadden. In terms of journalism, the New York Times, had an intense “opinion video” that offered nurses a chance to describe the negative effects of understaffing and to advocate for minimum staffing ratios (our 2nd place winner). Sarah DiGregorio had a very strong op-ed in The Washington Postabout understaffing and travel nursing during Covid. And the BBC had a powerful documentary about the Health Wagon, the nurse-led rural Virginia community health initiative. Nurse radio hosts Diana Mason, Diane Reed, and Maureen McGrath continue to bring the nurse’s voice to the airwaves. On the downside, portrayals of nurses as the low-skilled servants of brilliant physicians continued to dominate the U.S. television landscape. That was the case in shows like Grey’s Anatomy (ABC) and Good Sam (CBS). The physician-centric New Amsterdam (NBC) included a couple plotlines that tried to portray challenges to nursing, but ended up presenting nurses as helpless victims who had to be rescued by maverick physicians. And an episode of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel (Amazon) offered a short tribute to nurses—as unskilled female angels, not serious health professionals. Finally, drug company Johnson & Johnson continued its long-running campaign to identify itself with nursing, with probably the best and worst television advertisements of the year about the profession. Better understanding of nursing is possible—if we work together to educate others about the real value of the profession!