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The obvious choice is the captain because he looks like he knows what he is oing. His “image” broadcasts leadership and trust. This same situation can be applied to nursing. When it comes to medicine, people need someone they can trust. Trust starts with a positive image. Not many people will trust you if your clothes are dirty and old, or if your face is covered in piercings and tattoos. When someone’s well-being is at stake, that person is going to want a professional that knows what they are doing taking care of them. The first step towards being a professional is to look the part.
The second step is to act the part. A nurse has gone through tremendous amounts of schooling to get where they re and they should take the job seriously. Acting professional is a key link to earning a patient’s trust and when a patient trusts their nurse, it makes the nurse’s job much easier because the patient can remain calm around them. Even if a nurse is professional, kind, and compassionate every day, they still have to overcome the negative image set by the media and the nurses that came before them. Bobbie Berkowitz wrote a short article detailing how the media depicts nurses.
In this article Berkowitz discloses how TV shows such as Scrubbing In show little to nothing about how nurses interact with their patients. They like o focus more on the “drama. ” He states that TV shows depict nurses as being “self-centered, uncaring, unprofessional, and unintelligent. ” The THE IMAGE OF NURSING 3 media has always been depicting nurses negatively ever since the show M. A. S. H. was aired. This show depicted nurses as sexual deviants and nurses have continuously been depicted as such through costumes on Halloween like “the naughty nurse. Although the media constantly corrupts the nursing image, nurses still manage to show their true colors through actual patient testimonies. On June 27, 2013, Dr. Arnold Relman fell down a flight of stairs at his house nd cracked his skull and broke his neck. Thankfully, he was treated and taken care of by the medical staff at Massach usettS General for 1 0 weeks and once he left the hospital, he wrote a testimony to the care he received from the medical team. Take into extreme consideration that Dr.
Relman himself is a medical professional and even he took for granted the work that nurses do on a daily basis. In his testimony he stated that he “had never before understood how much good nursing care contributes to the patients’ safety and comfort. ” Testimonies such as the one above are one of the few things nurses have oing for them. Their reputation gets beat down daily by pointless TV shows. The articles above depict the two major ways that people portray nurses in todays society.
To some they are just assistants and to others, they are the life savers. Now, all that’s left to do is make experiences like Dr. Relman’s a reality for all patients under a nurse’s care. Only then will nurses once again have the positive image set by Florence Nightingale and others like her. As long as todays nurses stay professional, be kind to all, and lose the scrubs with cartoons and puppies on them, the image will continuously improve. References Berkowitz, B. (n. d. ). Nurses in the Media.
Retrieved March 23, 201 5, from http://nursing. columbia. edu/nurses-media Relman, A. (2014, February 6). On Breaking One’s Neck. Retrieved March 23, 201 5, from http:// www. nybooks. com/articIes/archives/2014/feb/06/on-breaking-ones-neck/ 5 Statement of What Learned This assignment helped me learn what a positive image means not only to your patients, but to the public and your colleagues as well. learned that it is up to the future generations of nursing to bring back the reputation that was tarnished by those before us.