If Nursing Is the Most Trusted Profession, Why Is Nobody Listening?

Guest article by, Angela Haynes Ferere, director of the Distance Accelerated Bachelor of Science in Nursing Program at the Emory University Nell Hodgson Woodruff School of Nursing

There is a difference between celebrating nurses and listening to their voices.  

Once a year, our friends and allies in the media take time to celebrate nurses. As nurses, we are profoundly grateful for the coverage that comes every May during National Nurses’ Month. Firsthand accounts from morning show hosts, feel-good hospital features, and local business giveaways reflect a genuine effort to show gratitude. This recognition is crucial and meaningful, as the underappreciation of nurses contributes to burnout, trauma, turnover, and a host of other serious issues. 

And yet, celebrating nurses in a national segment once a year is not the same as deferring to nurses as go-to experts on issues of national importance. It is not the same as covering “nurses’ issues” — like staffing shortages that threaten the solvency of health systems — as “healthcare issues” that impact us all. It is not the same as calling on nursing guest editors and writers to enrich publications with their lived, clinical, and scientific expertise. 

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the media paid great homage to nurses. How often did they ask nurses to weigh in as experts and pundits on system-level solutions? Nurses were frontline clinicians, patients, family caregivers, and health system leaders during one of the most challenging times in healthcare history — and yet, we were rarely asked what we would do differently. 

Aren’t nurses concerned with more important things than media attention? 

Our absence from public discourse matters because information is power. Invisibility in the media correlates with invisibility in board rooms, on Capitol Hill, within regulatory bodies, and in the eyes of the public. Less than 5 percent of nurses hold board positions in health care, and very few hold chief executive positions. 

This is despite being the largest healthcare workforce sector and the ones who spend the most time with patients. 

Nurses have been named the most trusted profession by the public in Gallup polls every year since 2002 and, somehow, we are not considered a trusted source by national brokers of information.

When people who are not nurses speak for nurses, it leads to decisions like one nurse caring for upwards of six, seven, or more patients at once. 

To my friends in the media, do you know how it affects us when we are unable to answer every call light, question, and worry? How would it affect you if you were charged with protecting several human lives and you could not reach them all? 

The budgets and policies that create these conditions are, often, put in place by individuals who have never cared for or been patients themselves. We cannot afford to silence and dismiss nurses’ perspectives any longer. 

I am ready to speak. I am available for comment. I am prepared to submit a guest editorial. I bring a level of insight that many other, fully qualified experts cannot. 

Call on me, trust me. Not just because I am a nurse but because, while caring for patients during COVID, I became ill and became a patient myself. I battled for my life for five weeks in an ICU bed. A member of the most trusted profession, a stranger to me, was responsible for saving my life. I have been privileged to earn patients’ trust, and I have entrusted my life to nurses as well. 

As a nurse, nurse practitioner, and educator, I do not have to prove my value to my patients or my community. They recognize me and trust me. That trust should be enough — but it is not the only value nurses bring. Nurses understand health systems, which means we can help them run smoother. We guide patients through seemingly impossible barriers to care, which means we can help remove them for everyone. And we know where the real waste is happening, which means we can help stop it. Most importantly, we can tell the stories that lead to change because we have lived the stories. 

When the next crisis event surfaces, nurses will again be called to respond — and we will, without hesitation, charge forward to care for patients, just as we have always done. Trusting us is essential, but do not stop there. Listen to us. This caring profession is not soft but filled with driven, capable, fierce and hardworking individuals who continue doing the hard things. 

To my nursing friends and colleagues, if our invisibility in the media hasn’t impacted you yet, it will. There will come a time when your patients, peers or community will need you to lead them — and you won’t have the voice or influence to do so. 

This Nurses’ Month, let’s do something to change that.  

Use your social platform to @ your local, regional or national media outlets and let them know you are #AvailableForComment. 

Angela Haynes Ferere, DNP, FNP-BC, MPH, is director of the Distance Accelerated Bachelor of Science in Nursing Program at the Emory University Nell Hodgson Woodruff School of Nursing, home to the No. 1 master’s, No. 3 BSN and No. 6 DNP programs nationwide, according to U.S. News & World Report. She actively practices as a Family Nurse Practitioner and leads Eternal Hope in Haiti Inc., a foundation in Haiti created to provide health care to vulnerable individuals and families.