The article “Address can mean life or death in organ vigil” provided important information on one of the disparities in our health-care “system.”
The pictures that ran with the story, however, illustrated an even bigger problem for me, which is the invisibility of nurses in the media.
The caption under the picture of two nurses transporting the donated liver stated, “A donated liver arrives at St. Luke Hospital . . . “
How in the world could a liver “arrive” anywhere?
The other picture showed a sterile table with the caption “Surgeons and assistants . . . “
Just who might those assistants be?
Nurses!
As a former operating room nurse, I immediately recognized the different instruments and sutures that would need to be organized and counted by the OR nurses before, during and at the conclusion of the transplant surgery.
Our country is facing a shortage of nurses that is going to grow as Baby Boomers like myself retire over the next 10 to 15 years.
We also face a critical shortage of nursing faculty to educate the next generation of nurses.
Therefore we need to attract more women and men to the nursing profession.
The media could be a great resource to do that.
A beginning step would be to use the word “nurse” in stories such as this one, which features pictures of nurses.
