Hi again everyone!

In my Last blog post I talked about how I was reading Suzanne Gordon’s book From Silence to Voice. Well, in the middle of reading this book, my new Amazon book order arrived!!! (p.s. I LOVE buying books probably more than anything else). In the shipment was Suzanne’s newest book When Chicken Soup Isn’t Enough: Stories of Nurses Standing Up for Themselves, Their Patients, and Their Profession. I immediately began reading it and couldn’t put it down. The book is an amazing compilation of stories from nurses in all practice settings across the world and highlights how advocacy in nursing isn’t easy….but is very important. The stories, while all different, are in many ways the same. The overall message I got was that nurses have the potential for a powerful collective voice and have the ability to make positive changes to politics, policy, and patient care. Both of Suzanne Gordon’s books highlight this theme well. And so, now that I’m becoming more aware of the need to have a strong, positive, and united voice… I find myself becoming frustrated by- and more aware of- all the messaging that is out there in the world that is continually setting back our profession, especially with the increasing popularity of social media.

(Social)Media & the Potential Degradation of Our Profession:

If you google search the term “sexy nurse” you will find 2,780,000 potential websites related to the topic!!! If you search “nurse angel” you will get 1,590,000 potential websites! But it doesn’t end with just searching for websites…if you go to Facebook and do the same searches, you will find over 200 groups dedicated to the topic of “sexy nurses”! The sheer number of these types of  groups & sites reflect the pervasiveness of such demeaning messaging. As I’ve begun to use Twitter in my professional life, I’ve also noticed that some nurses who use Twitter (as nurses rather than for personal use) write degrading messages about other nursing areas, nursing practice itself, use profanity, and even write implications of drug abuse.

Nurse-to-nurse Degradation:

One particularly interesting story was shared by a nurse from Calgary, Alberta- named Gregg Trueman. This story began with Gregg entering a clinical placement as a nurse midwife student and quickly getting some very strong messaging from his (female) counterparts and leaders that being a male midwife was not appropriate and shouldn’t be an option. The story ends with Gregg finding a niche working in Hospice Palliative Care but addressed the fact that even in this present day, there is “gender-based ridicule and professional marginalization daily as they [males] seek their role as a professional nurse.” This is a sad and disheartening fact for me to think about.

I get so frustrated by the thought that this is happening all the time in our profession and in wider society & I believe through these messages we are drastically lessening our collective power. Nurses must not break each other down; we should be taking the time to uplift each other as individual nurses and as a professional whole. It is important that nurses don’t ‘eat their young’ or marginalize others because of race, gender, education, or even specialty area in nursing.

Dealing with this very topic there is another book that I plan to read called Saving Lives: Why the Media’s Portrayal of Nurses Puts Us All at Risk ;which takes this concept even further and expands on why the behaviours mentioned above impact the media’s portrayal of nursing. I found a quote from Newsweek magazine about this book that I felt was very relevant:“Saving Lives has a serious point, that the devaluation of nursing… discourages students from the field and contributes to a critical nursing shortage.” I think this says it all!

Oncology Nursing:

Think about this in relation to oncology nursing especially. It is already difficult to recruit (and retain) nurses into the field of oncology – I’d boldly suggest even more so than many other fields in healthcare- and so this ultimately takes the comment from Newsweek to the next level making it even more difficult to recruit into oncology.

With the ever increasing pervasiveness of cancer amongst all humans worldwide, and the ever decreasing (or some might say stagnant) public image of nursing, all nurses – especially oncology nurses- must be aware of the impact of how we are perceived by the public, politicians, the media, and our healthcare peers.  Without a change in our public image and voice, I worry about the implications to oncology nursing practice….and ultimately, patient and public safety.

I just wanted to close with a quote that I really liked in Gregg Trueman’s story, which according to the story was what many female medical students in the 60s were told: “stay the course, study and work hard, and ignore the gossip from those who do not know your heart” (Trueman as cited in Gordon, 2010, p. 232).