The incoming Administration’s new Covid-19 task force excludes nurses

Posted on by Sandy Summers and Harry Jacobs Summers

November 11, 2020 — President-elect Joe Biden and Vice-President-elect Kamala Harris have now announced the names of the 13 members of their new Covid-19 task force. The panel is mostly physicians and includes no nurses. But nurses provide the vast majority of the skilled care that Covid-19 patients receive, and they have deep understanding of how the crisis is playing out on the ground. Nurses also have diverse public health and policy expertise, including in the fields of infection control, health disparities, and community health. Nurses know and do a great deal that physicians do not. So with nurses, the panel will be far more effective. Please join us in urging that nurses be added!

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Hundreds of people suffocating to death

Posted on by Sandy Summers and Harry Jacobs Summers

In October 2020 CNN reported on a widely-shared TikTok video in which nurse Cristina Hops expressed outrage at a tweet by Donald Trump urging people not to “be afraid of Covid.” Hops argued that the tweet undermined the efforts of health workers to get the public to take the deadly disease seriously. That is strong patient advocacy.

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Raising Cain

Posted on by Sandy Summers and Harry Jacobs Summers

The fourth season of the hospital drama, which aired in summer 2017, still included the competent emergency nurse Kenny. But as always, every other major character was a physician. And even more than in the past, the show portrayed nurses as mere assistants to the physicians, with limited skills and no autonomy—especially in an egregious plotline in which a seemingly gifted nurse turned out to be a physician.

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PSYCHOTHERAPY

Posted on by Sandy Summers and Harry Jacobs Summers

In October 2020 VICE reported that after a Korean health union complained, YG Entertainment agreed to remove several images in the video for BLACKPINK’s “Lovesick Girls” in which group member Jennie had appeared in a quasi-naughty nurse outfit. The images could have been worse, but as the union rightly noted, sexual abuse remains a serious problem for modern nurses.

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The old front line

Posted on by Sandy Summers and Harry Jacobs Summers

The July 2020 issue honored those on the “new front line.” One cover featured a midwife. And inside, that nurse advocated for more NHS funding. But nurses are not the “new” front line—they have been saving lives for a long time! Yet the editor’s essay did not group them with physicians, the recognized health experts, but with workers who are not in health care at all.

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“Save one life, you’re a hero. Save a hundred lives, well then you’re a nurse.”

Posted on by Sandy Summers and Harry Jacobs Summers

Nursing will be back to prime time. The big news is Netflix’s release of Ratched, but the streaming giant will also offer more of the actually-pretty-good portrayal of nursing on romantic drama Virgin River. And it seems there will always be the BBC’s Call the Midwife, with its strong portrayals of nursing. But on the new show Transplant, about a refugee trauma physician, nurses are peripheral helpers. And otherwise, the landscape will be dominated by other physician-centric dramas, ranging from Chicago Med, which has several skilled nurses, to Grey’s Anatomy, which never has.

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Paging Dr. Zenk

Posted on by Sandy Summers and Harry Jacobs Summers

In July 2020 the National Institutes of Health announced that Shannon Zenk, RN, PhD, would assume the role of director of the National Institute of Nursing Research in fall 2020. Since August 2019, NINR has been without a nurse director, with that role being filled on an interim basis by a dentist and then a biologist. Last year the Truth, joined by many nurses, urged NIH to appoint a nurse as interim director. In any case, we congratulate Dr. Zenk on her appointment.

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The Action Figures

Posted on by Sandy Summers and Harry Jacobs Summers

An engaging Vox video argues that men should overcome regressive gender notions and enter nursing, which it calls the “robot-proof” “job of the future.” But the video itself reinforces the gendered angel stereotype that nursing is all about “caring and empathy,” ignoring the advanced scientific skills and critical judgments that modern nursing requires.

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She’s here

Posted on by Sandy Summers and Harry Jacobs Summers

Creator Ryan Murphy describes the new show, about the iconic battle-axe nurse from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, as “an imagining of how this monster was created.” We have long feared the series will reinforce the harmful stereotyping of the original, which linked female nursing authority with malevolence. Will Ratched give viewers a sense that nurses are anything more than disturbed clinical abusers?

 1,718 total views

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