Real-world nurses bring competency, professionalism, and passion to the hospital everyday. But according to a new study, it wasn’t until recently that onscreen nurses exhibited these qualities.
David Stanley, MSc, RN, RM, lecturer at the School of Nursing and Midwifery at Curtin University of Technology, in Perth, Australia, studied 280 films featuring nurses produced throughout the U.S., U.K., Western Europe, Canada, Japan, and Australia between 1900 and 2007. The study, which was published in the October issue of the Journal of Advanced Nursing, revealed a positive shift in the portrayal of fictional nurses.
Stanley examined drama, comedy, horror, mystery, romance, and other genres, noting that in earlier flicks, nurse characters were often women who were “nice, kind, and feminine,” implying that this was all that was required to be a nurse. Other early on-screen nurses were portrayed as threatening or sex objects. But today’s on-screen nurses, he says, are “intelligent, strong, and passionate.”
Source: WebMD.com
October 24th, 2008 at 3:19 pm
I guess they have come a long way but I think that nurses are still portrayed in an unjust light in the media. There are so many shows on television about doctors and not one about nurses. The shows that do have nurses on them make them seem less intelligent and like their jobs are less important. I was watching Grey’s Anatomy last night and the doctors were doing things that nurses do in reality and it made it seem like the doctors do these wonderful things for the patients but in most cases its not them at all- its the nurses. It makes me a little upset but we have come a long way from the white dresses and caps. I just wish that for once their was a show or movie that was solely based on nursing- maybe then we would inspire the youth of today to make a career move that would benefit us all.