Nursings` Responsibilities For Improving Its Own Image
a. Recognize that an image problem does exist and that each individual nurse has a responsibility ti improve the profession`s image.
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b. Strengthen involvement in professional organizations, nursing is extremely powerful.
c. All nurses, including staff nurses, should be provided the opportunity to become salaried staff members rather than hourly wage earners.
d. Nurses must become politically active and politically knowledgeable; nurses should run for office.
e. Documentation is crucial, shifts the balances of power, and allows nurses to state their case on a rational basis; documentation is also essential for third party payment.
f. Write and submit feature stories on nurses for local media.
g. Demand that nurse authors be considered for editing health columns.
h. Provide technical assistance to media.
i. Provide ongoing public service announcements; focus attention on well-defined services created and controlled by nurses: case management, nurse-managed homeless centers, wellness centers, birthing centers.
j. Create public forums –“spend a day with a nurse”.
k. Have nurses present educational talks at local shopping malls, public education series.
l. Establish a speakers bureau for local elementary, junior, and high schools.
m. Improve the community image; volunteer for community sponsored activities (Big Sister League, American Heart Association, AIDS Project).
n. Nursing career literature, especially books in schools and public libraries that introduce the profession to prospective nurses, need to be revised and updated by nurse authors.
o. Health care texts must be improved and updated to reflect the 1990s image for nursing.
p. Nurses must become more active as authors and as collaborators with established authors to receive accurate and quality literary portrayals.
q. Monitor the “get well” cards found in hospital gift shops and in local card shops; any adverse portrayal of nurses should be protested verbally and in writing.
r. Establish schools of nursing as research and information centers for people experiencing critical health care issues, i.e., AIDS, homelessness.
s. Increase staff nurse involvement in scholarly activities such as research.
t. Never allow the nursing profession to be portrayed as physicians` handmaidens; insist, instead, that nurses be portrayed as physicians` peers.
(Grace L. Deloughery, 1991, Issues and Trends in Nursing, Mosby Year Book, St. Louis, Missouri).
