After posting that idiocy about the travel nurses followng the rainbow to sunny SoCal, I realized how grating I find the term “unsung heroes” as it applies to medicine and healthcare.

So this post will undoubtedly send fireworks into the brains of the nursing police, the ones who think the media is responsible for the nursing shortage and that nursing is a calling.

Nursing is a job, a profession, not some magical and mystical calling that puts the people who follow this path above everyone else. Nurses are not more heroic, if we must use that overworked word, than anyone else who cares for sick patients. If anything, I would award the title of unsung heroes to nurses aides who slave away in long term care facilities. Talk about doing scut work for pennies. These people are paid minumum wage or thereabouts, get to perform most of the “dirty” care and heavy work, are often belittled by nurses, and get no recognition.

Healthcare involves many people at all levels. If we want to do a countdown of unsung heroes, then let’s not forget the cornucopia of therapists (speech, occupational, physical, respiratory), all of whom work incredibly hard to help people heal. The aides I have mentioned. There are also the unit clerks, and a really good clerk can make your day.

Doctors. Yes, doctors. Unsung heroes. Many physicians put in incredibly long hours, and try their best to care for patients even as managed care grinds into their practice. Residents, who often exist on minimal sleep and food, are also heroes.

Healthcare is a team, and functions best when all respect eachother, acknowledge that each has a uniques and individual job to perform, and realize that one team member is not superior to the other.

So please, stop with the idoltry of nurses. I would like nurses to demand respect, and to receive it, but they do not stand out as the unsung heroes of healthcare.

I remember a line in the movie Forest Gump, where Sally Field says, “Stupid is as stupid does.” Or something like that. But whatever the exact phrasing, it certainly applies to the latest act of stupidity in fighting the late great nursing shortage.

And guess what someone has come up with? I already discussed the brainstorm of humiliating nurses by attaching them to leashes and monitoring how long it takes them to piss and wipe their butt, and how much time it takes them to shove a pill down an old lady’s throat. But this one is even better.

Reality nursing! Cool!

Access Nurses, a national nurse staffing company, is combating the nation’s nursing shortage and encouraging more people to enter the profession by changing the image of nursing through it’s new reality show, 13 Weeks.

By creating a show about six travel nurses on a dream assignment in
southern California, Access Nurses shines a spotlight on the unsung heroes of medicine. Travel nurses are highly qualified healthcare professionals who travel the country working in hospitals with acute needs for thirteen weeks at a time. 13 Weeks will showcase the very intense and challenging hospital work environment, the thrill of exploring Southern California, and the demands of living with five new roommates.

Is this like the Brady Bunch does nursing? First, nurses on assignment don’t live in dorm-like housing. They are usually assigned their own apartment, or at most, live with one roommate. But how boring to show one lone nurse in her little apartment in Van Nuys, n’est-ce pas? That’s not the California nursing experience, or at least, not the one that will entice naive innocents into thinking that they, too, can have this marvelous experience. This five-giggling-girls-to-a-house, and wowee, we’re in SoCal, sounds suspiciously like the Hollywood version of reality. Not the real life experience of a traveling nurse.

And what exciting reality does the show plan to reveal? That nurses on a dream assignment to sunny California spend most of their time at the beach, work with doctors who look like Dr. Kildare, and spend their work time floating down corridors donned in crisp white caps and bikini bottoms? And get invited to the Academy Awards because they have been recognized as unsung heroes?

Since this so-called reality show is designed to entice people into nursing, and make it seem like a “dream,” I highly doubt that there is going to be much reality included. Will these nurses be forced to work mandatory overtime? Will their nurse managers be total assholes, as it increasingly common in hospital settings? Will their work schedules be changed without their permission or input? California has a mandated nurse-patient ratio, so hospitals are stuck with it, but will it show how many facilities are circumventing that by firing ancilliary personnel and requiring nurses to pick up the slack? Do you think that they’ll show these sweet little Brady Bunch girls pulling trash and linens, transcribing orders (no clerk), running their butt off answering phones and call bells, being forcibly pulled to work on a unit where they have no training…

You really have to wonder about the people who come up with these ideas.

Read the press release at PRN Newswire