Hawthorne: Nursing Goes Hollywood
I tuned in to TNT for the series premiere of Hawthorne last night and came away a little disappointed.
Christina Hawthorne, played by Jada Pinkett Smith, is the CNO of the fictional Richmond Trinity Hospital. She's smart, tenacious and compassionate. She's respectable.
Other characters, not so much. Stereotypes abound. Nurse Ray Stein questions Dr. Marshall's insulin order for a patient with diabetes -- and rightly so, it turns out. Stein finally tracks down Dr. Marshall via phone (naturally, the doctor is on the golf course), to question the order and gets a curt "I'm the doctor, you're the nurse" response. The patient has an adverse reaction, a lawsuit is threatened and the fingers start pointing. Dr. Marshall's orders are clearly written on the patient's record. Wouldn't that give clarity to the situation? And there was no mention whatsoever of nursing documentation throughout this process.
Another stereotype: this patient, until it's explicitly stated, repeatedly refers to Stein, a man, as "doctor." When he finally gets that Stein is a nurse, he chuckles derisively. Can't we evolve past this? On the up side, at least there's a male nurse in the cast. He's a frustrated former med student (he was on track to graduate from an institution in Paraguay), but at least he seems to have his act together.
Probably the worst stereotype is that of nurse Candy. A blonde cutie, she gives the patient with diabetes, a veteran, a little extra (ahem) TLC. "While the program attempts to depict nursing in a positive light, it also resorts to the offensive and demeaning stereotype of sexual interaction between a nurse and a patient," read a June 17 ANA press release, "and in doing so, insults the intelligence and professionalism of nurses and of women." Yes.
And I know this is a drama that focuses more on the staff's personal lives than medicine, but the show would have been more credible had it gone into some detail and used more medical terminology when discussing cases.
Let's face it, this is a fictional television show, not a documentary. I'm all for the dramatic arts and creative license. And the fact that there is this new hour-long drama about an executive-level nurse shows that nurses and nursing are creeping further into the public consciousness. But it seems to me that a number of stereotypes should have been avoided. Maybe this is Hollywood's view of what nursing is. Let’s hope this show evolves.