Nurses On Television, How Far Have We Come?
Between the short-lived but well-received 1980′s drama ‘Nurse’ and the current painfully realistic and often dark comedy ‘Nurse Jackie’ there have been a handful of prime time television shows which portrayed nurses and the nursing profession in an often negative or inaccurate light. From the love lorn nurses or Chicago Hope, so busy with their office romances it seems logistically impossible for them to afford any time to deliver patient care, to the nurses of ER who were excellent medical professionals who seemed to be wasting their time as mere nurses (One of the leads actually ‘wizened up’ and went back to med school and became a physician.) But now that the new television series’s, such as Nurse Jackie, have become more gritty, realistic and often show the dark underbelly of the profession, are the critics of these modern shows shooting themselves in the foot by pointing out the inaccuracies of the modern batch of nursing related shows? How accurate is accurate? How much should artistic license been influenced until we have an exact duplication of life on a typical hospital unit, which in this editors opinion, would make for an extremely bland hour of television.
A pair of new TV shows—HawthoRNe and Nurse Jackie—finally puts nurses front and center. One contributes to longstanding misconceptions about the profession, the other nails real-life nursing like never before
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