Author: Marijke Vroomen-Durning
Hands up if you’ve ever been asked why you went into nursing instead of medicine. I imagine that there are a lot of hands up in the air right now.
There’s an overwhelming misconception out there that suggests that nursing is a lower level of medicine or healthcare. If you want to be at the top of the ladder, you become a doctor. If you’re not good enough, you become a nurse. I’ve even met doctors with that philosophy but I’ve not met many nurses that feel that way.
You and I know that being a nurse is so very different from being a doctor. I often tell people that doctors look after the problems, nurses look after the patients. Another example I use is that the doctor may treat the broken leg, but it’s the nurses that help you deal with the pain and the discomfort. We make sure you don’t get bedsores while you’re in traction; we make sure you eat and your body functions properly. That’s the difference between a doctor and a nurse. But what can we do to get the public past the misconception?
Not long ago, a Montreal newspaper ran an article, a good article, on the role of nurse practitioners. It was well-written and gave the public a glimpse of the role and the value of this little known profession. The quality and interest of the article aside, the newspaper offended a lot of nurses before they even got to the article because of the introduction. The story was promoted with the line, More Than Just a Nurse.
In 2005, statistics showed that there were around 252,000 registered nurses in Canada and 65,000 licensed practical nurses. Or, should we say, “just nurses”. These nurses range in education from a three-year college program to those with Bachelor, Master, and Doctorate degrees. I think that these people are hardly just nurses.
Among professions, nursing seems to suffer about the most with its image. Many people don’t understand what nurses do or they have misconceptions of their role. On television, we are still portrayed in most shows as handmaidens to the doctors, if we’re shown at all. The popular show House, which I admit I really do enjoy watching, rarely shows nurses doing anything of value. The show has physicians and specialists doing all procedures, even taking blood and giving medications. The few times you see a nurse in a scene with one of the main characters, he or she is asking a not-too bright question. Other programs portray nurses blindly following orders or acting as sex objects. Notably, ER does seem to buck the trend.
Nurses have protested against these portrayals and misconceptions for years and yet, they continue. It is no wonder that the general public doesn’t seem to know what nurses really do.
We have “International Nurse’s Day”. How many people even know when that is? It happens to be in May, mind you, there’s no “International Teacher’s Day” or “International Speech Pathologist’s Day”, so I guess the fact that we even have a day does make us stand out a bit. But do we really need an international day to feel appreciated or understood? We need for the public to know what we really do. That is what’s going to help.
I have had my fair share of call-bells from patients who really just needed a maid; I’ve been spoken to by some family members of patients as if I was an idiot. These things happen, unfortunately. The pertinent issue is; how do we raise our profile so that people really do understand what nursing is all about?
Men who want to be nurses are still met with raised eyebrows and women are told that they could do so much better. But for many of us, there isn’t anything better than being a nurse – being a nurse is what we want.
Every aspect of health care has its own role, but nursing overlaps many of them. We need to know enough about nutrition to know when to call in a nutritionist, enough about physiotherapy to be able to continue the exercises and programs outlined by the physio department. We need to know when social work is needed; we need to be able to work with all the disciplines within the healthcare field.
Nurses are the gate-keepers. We are the ones who notice the gradual decline of a patient, or the gradual improvement. We are the ones who can report that a patient’s family isn’t supportive, or that the patient has nowhere to go. We learn much of this information while doing our bedside care and taking some time to talk and to listen to these people who trust us with their lives.
Why not med school? Because I want to be a nurse. Not just a nurse. I want to be a Nurse.
© Copyright, PeopleMenders, 2009. All Rights Reserved.
About the Author
Marijke has been an RN since 1983 and now works full-time as a freelance medical writer and editor. Although she writes for both professional and general public audiences, her passion is in patient education, which was inspired by the patient teaching part of nursing.
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