Dianne Martin recalls the time her daughter Kaitlin was getting ready to go out to a Halloween party and her friend showed up in a sexy nurse costume.
She took one look at her friend and said, ‘Well, you might as well come in and have a conversation with my mom.'
There are too many stereotypes in pop culture working against nurses, says Martin, a 31-year veteran of nursing and executive director of the Registered Practical Nurses Association of Ontario. And TV writers aren't doing much to help the problem, she says.
It's hard enough as a nurse to get treated as a professional. I've been touched inappropriately by a male patient before — I grew up in an era where men believed if you can't get a date, get a nurse,” she says.
And a trio of new medical-drama television shows — Nurse Jackie, Hawthorne and Mercy — aren't helping to improve the professional image of nurses.
I look at the nurses around me who are brilliant and making important decisions every day and I don't see them much in these shows,” says Martin.
She says there are too many flaws in Nurse Jackie scripts to make it credible: from the tailored, body-fitting scrubs the actors wear to the question of how a drug-addicted ER nurse finds time to cheat on her husband with the hospital pharmacist and grab lunch at a fancy restaurant with her physician gal-pal — all during the course of her shift at a busy New York City hospital,
Edie Falco portrays Jackie Peyton as a strong, smart, skilled nurse. But the character's personal life is a bit of a mess.
Addicted to painkillers for the aches and pains in her back, Jackie uses her relationship with the pharmacist to gain access to drugs, occasionally swigging Percocet-laced coffee to get through the day.
I've watched a lot of Nurse Jackie and it's a real dilemma,” says Martin.
We finally have a show that depicts the complexity of nursing but I don't recognize her, and I've worked in seven hospitals in Ontario. She wouldn't last long in our environment.
In a recent survey of 153 registered practical nurses and RPN students across Ontario, 52.7 per cent said Jackie would only last a few weeks in a real hospital, and another 29 per cent said she wouldn't last a year.
More than half of those surveyed feel TV shows featuring nurses do a disservice to the profession, while 20 per cent said the shows help the public understand the challenges of nursing. Another 28.7 per cent just see it as entertainment.
Martin, who was a labour and delivery nurse, has equal criticism for Mercy's Veronica Callahan, a nurse recently returned from Iraq suffering post-traumatic stress disorder who sleeps with a doctor at her hospital.
But she does like Hawthorne's title character, Christina Hawthorne, the chief nursing officer at a hospital in Richmond, Va.
The new shows are big departures from other medical dramas, such as Grey's Anatomy and House, which tend to ignore nurses.
In some shows, the only time you see a nurse is when she's having sex with a doctor,” says Martin, whose mother was a nurse and whose daughter is in her third year of a BScN nursing program at Nipissing University.
She says the shows do a disservice to the profession, rather than help the public understand the challenges a nurse faces every day at work.
Martin and her daughter watch Nurse Jackie and have analyzed its pros and cons. They do agree the naïve nursing student character, Zoey Barkow, is someone they can relate to. “She is very much like my daughter,” she says.
For Martin, the medical drama ER had the best nurses on TV, with Abby Lockhart and Carol Hathaway, even though both ended up wanting to be doctors.
Others applaud Nurse Jackie, Mercy and Hawthorne for finally putting the focus on nurses and dealing with issues such as doctor and patient harassment.
Suzanne Gordon, an author and a nursing professor at the University of Maryland, recently interviewed the cast of Nurse Jackie for The Progressive magazine. She says nurses need to take the show with a grain of salt and realize the show is a gift to nursing.
Last year, Gordon assigned her students to watch the show as homework.
I think Nurse Jackie is sensational. I don't think it hurts the image of nurses at all; I think it helps. A lot of nurses get hung up on Jackie's flaws, forgetting the convention of television these days is that the characters are flawed, but good,” she says. “The American hero is a rule breaker and she's a rule breaker.
Gordon says Mercy is “unconvincing” and Hawthorne is “horrible and unrealistic.
Some local front-line nurses find the new slate of shows refreshing, even if they do make them cringe now and then.
I have mixed views about it,” admits Anita Tsang-Sit, an RN with Peel Public Health.
I think I've always had mixed feelings about nursing roles on television. There haven't been too many strong ones and yet nurses are always on the list of most-trusted professionals.
Although some nurses feel Nurse Jackie is depicting the reality of a nurse's day, it ignores bigger issues such as staff shortages, Tsang-Sit says.
Nurses don't have time to go sleep with the pharmacist or go for a fine-dining lunch with one of the ER doctors,” she says.
She's a very strong nurse and it's a good show, but it's not an accurate depiction of what nurses do. I understand it's drama, but I don't think it's advocates strongly for nurses.
Poonam Sharma is a Humber College nursing student who loves the show, even though she acknowledges the Jackie character has many flaws.
When I first saw Nurse Jackie, I thought it was brilliant. She's a complex clinician, but she's passionate about her patients,” says Sharma, a third-year nursing student who is also vice-president of Nursing Students of Ontario.
Last summer, Sharma worked as a clinical support nurse in the oncology department at Brampton Hospital.
The public thinks nursing is all about bedside work and they don't realize it is so broad,” says Sharma.
Five realistic TV nurses
Carol Hathaway
(Julianna Margulies), ER
Abby Lockhart
(Maura Tierney), ER
Maj. “Hot Lips” Houlihan
(Loretta Swit), M*A*S*H
Colleen McMurphy
(Dana Delaney), China Beach
Helen Rosenthal
(Christina Pickles), St. Elsewhere
Five unrealistic TV nurses
Jackie Peyton
(Edie Falco), Nurse Jackie
Christina Hawthorne
(Jada Pinkett Smith), Hawthorne
Dixie McCall
(Julie London), Emergency!
Mildred Ratched (Louise Fletcher),
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
Bobbie Spencer
(Jacklyn Zeman), General Hospital
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