This is a story I picked up about the nursing profession as a whole and how the public perceives us. We had a whole discussion about some of this last week on the brand new Insights in Nursing show. I don’t know if you checked out Insights in Nursing but you definitely should do so. It’s a new panel discussion show I’ve started where I bring on nurse leaders, specifically online nurse leaders – bloggers, some of the nurse leadership from some of our nurse organizations and we talk about certain things that crop up in the news, certain issues that are important to us in nursing. Last week we discussed some of the public’s perceptions of nurses, some of the negative things that people think about what nurses do, how our profession works and how we relate to physicians and other members of the healthcare profession.
It was something that I wanted to just kind of point out that despite the fact that we might not- people might not understand exactly how our profession works in tandem with other members of the healthcare team, that we are highly regarded. That bear out in survey after survey after survey, that nurses are viewed consistently as among the most respected members of any profession especially the health care profession.
This just bears out in an article I found over at medical news today.com and looking at the article here on my screen, the nursing profession in Australia showed up as the most ethical profession for the 16th year in a row. Ever since nurses were added to this survey in 1994, nurses have showed up at the top of the list. In fact, an astounding 89% of Australians marked nurses as the most respected and ethical profession in their communities. That just bears out I think in survey after survey around the world and including the United States and many other places. It is just a credit to you and so I’d like to thank you for continuing to raise the bar.
I think that we are quietly working in the background and people see that. People pay attention to what we are doing even though we don’t draw attention to ourselves very often. I just wanted to say congratulations nurses, you’ve done it again, you’ve proved yourselves to be just the caregivers that you strive to be and despite some of the bad press we get sometimes from TV shows, from nurses in the news that aren’t really acting the way we would like them to act.
Ultimately as a whole, nurses are very well viewed by the public we serve and we need to continue of course to live up to that but it certainly speaks well for those of us that are in the profession now and I just wanted to thank you and I’m going to do my best to continue to bear up my end of that and help you understand what’s going on in the nursing community from this end here at Nursing Show.
————
This article has been featured in the news segment of the Nursing Show episode Toxic Syndromes with Lisa Booze and Episode 141
