When I was in nursing school I remember reading about the Center for Nursing Advocacy and their efforts to improve the portrayal of nurses in the media. At the time I asked, “What’s all the hoopla about?” They were particularly vocal about a movie called “Nurse Betty.” I remembered watching that movie and vaguely enjoying it. I don’t think that it planted a seed in my head that all nurses were crazy (like the main character.) It’s true there are plenty of TV shows and movies that portray nurses in an unrealistic fashion. It just seems silly to conduct protests and letter writing campaigns, because the media is a supply and demand type operation and they are just giving the people what they want.

But then I became a nurse, and I started noticing things…

I remember watching a rerun of ER one day and the plot involved the attending MD asking Carter (who at the time was still a resident) to go and fire some the nurses. A resident firing a nurse? Do the writers of the show really have no idea about how management is divided in the hospital? Meanwhile I got a good laugh out of it.

In a more recent episode of ER there was some kind of tragedy – a deck collapsing, I think – and two of the docs happened to be there. They set about triaging and I roared when I watched them confirm breath sounds (without a stethoscope) and determine someone’s blood pressure simply by touching their arm.

So if I ever do actually tune in to ER these days, it’s for the comedy.

Then along came “House.” I remember seeing the commercials. A House MD who’s name is actually “House.” How quaint. I figured I’d bypass that one. But then I actually found myself watching it one night and before I knew it I got hooked. You see, I love the the medical mystery aspect of it. The art of medicine is all about not having the luxury of opening up your patient to figure out the solution. And I enjoy the (not so subtle) digs the writers direct at surgeons. Whenever the crew finds themselves in the OR the surgeon is always saying something obnoxious about money. It makes one think that the writers actually have spent some time working in medicine.

But the more I got hooked on House, the more I realized that there wasn’t exactly an unfavorable portrayal of nursing, there simply were no nurses. The doctors did everything – hang meds, give shots, etc. The only time you do see a nurse she’s usually just sitting there giving House a sullen look after he has said something snarky.

And the other TV show? The one about the surgeons? I can barely even comment on that. I watched the season premier – I happened to be hanging out with my mom, who watches the show. She told me the previous story line about the doctor who fell in love with the transplant patient and then somehow endanger the patient’s life so that his acuity would increase, hence moving them up on the transplant list. I was dumbfounded. This is the show everyone’s been talking about?

What really got to me was a message board for nurses I came across one day, which shall remain nameless. It’s the largest message board out there for nurses but I refuse to name it because they refuse to acknowledge nursing blogs (they feel that linking to anything outside of their site would somehow detract from their own advertisers… but that subject is for another post.) Anyhow, a nurse started a thread about Grey’s Anatomy and “how totally awesome” it is. And hundreds of nurses replied to discuss how much they love the show. Like I said earlier, the media operates on supply and demand. They give the people what they want. And apparently there are a lot of nurses out there who like to drool over McDreamy for an hour a week and they don’t seem to mind that it portrays nurses unfavorably.

On the other hand, if there’s no big deal about unrealistic portrayal of nurses in on TV shows, then I wonder what took me so long to actually become a nurse? After all, I grew up watching Emergency and St. Elswhere. Hmmm…