Recognize nurses as the influencers in health and healthcare that we are
Last month I was recognized by the Philadelphia Inquirer as an Influencer of Healthcare in the category of Excellence in Innovation. It was an honor to represent my profession of nursing and the field of nursing innovation. The event honored 27 “Heroes of Healthcare” in nine different categories; just seven were nurses, three of whom won for “Nurse of the Year.” More than half of the winners (14) were physicians, and the remaining six were other business or healthcare providers/researchers.
This weekend, the Philadelphia Inquirer is hosting a workshop entitled: Telling Your Health Story, “A health journalism workshop for providers and patients,” and while I am excited to learn about this workshop, not one speaker of the twenty-two listed is a nurse. Widespread and consistent exclusion of nursing expertise is a prime example of the media’s misunderstanding of the profession.
Nurses working to #AmplifyNursing have identified a troubling trend that impacts the public understanding of our scope of our practice. We struggle for proper and fair recognition of our expertise in the news and in the media, generally. These trends have been highlighted by recent research and on social media platforms such as Twitter (#NurseTwitter and #NursesWhoTweet), where nurses from around the world frequently share stories of exclusion from media coverage of health stories. The recently published “Woodhull Revisited” study, conducted by nurse scientists Barbara Glickstein and Diana Mason, revealed that only 2% of healthcare stories in the last 20 years used a nurse as an expert source. It is time for nurses to demand our experience and knowledge be considered equal to our physician counterparts, to call out these glaring omissions when we see them, and to change the narrative.
Nurses are exceptional clinicians. We also use our nursing expertise in many other contexts too, including in the research labs, classrooms, community settings as well as in the military, in courtrooms, and in Congress. We are in all of these places and many more. Nurses number nearly 4 million members of the workforce in the United States, and nearly 50% of all health care providers globally (WHO, 2020). Our collective impact is so important that the World Health Organization (WHO) has recently declared 2020 the official, “Year of the Nurse and Midwife”. Members of the news media, including journalists of the Philadelphia Inquirer, should seek out nurses as primary sources for stories with a health focus.
As I stated, I am honored to have been recognized by the Philadelphia Inquirer as a healthcare influencer, but more than an award, to truly recognize nurses as influencers in health and healthcare means to include us as sources in the news stories and events that shape the health and healthcare narrative today. Without us, the bigger story will continue to be missed.
Marion Leary, MSN, MPH, RN
With contributions from nurse colleagues Robin Cogan, MEd, RN, NCSN and Rachel Walker, PhD, RN, OCN
