Oct 18 2007
Mind vs. body
6:17 a.m. Some mornings I wake up and wish I had a regular job. So that I can call in sick. It’s a herculean battle between mind and body.
Yikes!! I’ve missed my pledge to blog once a week. I’ve got to leave for clinicals in 5 minutes, but very quickly these are the two important entries I’ve been crafting in my head:
- The public image of nursing and how nurses are working to change it for the better. I’m on board for this. I’m proud to be a nursing student and nurses are the most hardworking, undervalued professionals I’ve seen.
- The face of nursing school and nursing. Both seem to be dismally underrepresented by ‘minorities,’ while the face of our patients is increasingly diverse. Are schools retaining students of color? (No.) Why aren’t there more professors and nurse leaders of color? What’s being done about this?
Ok, gotta run. Have a good week!
We often discuss these two issues in my nursing classes. In fact, we are so frequently disturbed by the image of nurses as sex symbols, assistants, etc that we took a sorority’s cartoon portrayal of a nurse from a blood drive poster and brought it to the attention of Student Life, who had approved the add. She was wearing high heels, cleavage showing, etc. We all want the way the public sees nurses to grow and change, we want them to recognize our profession as independent but interdependant on the rest of the healthcare team.
Judy Martin-Holland at UCSF does a lot of work on the diversity-in-nursing issue. She’s teaching the sociocultural issues class this quarter and while we haven’t heard much about her minority recruitment efforts, she’s often traveling and doing that kind of work, so I bet she would be a great source for info. Her faculty profile lists her as assistant dean of academic services and diversity (http://nurseweb.ucsf.edu/www/ffmartj.htm).