Nursing Professional to the Public
According to the general public, nursing is seen as a combination of skills, professionalism, and knowledge. Today nursing is treated as a healthcare professional with its rights, and that has a great possession of knowledge. On the contrary, the public, in most cases, does not value their competencies and skills that they have attained through innovation and education. It is caused as a result of the increasing trend of stereotyping. A lot of people believe that the working conditions of the nurses are powerless, hard, lacking autonomy, and thus they have other dreams of their career. The income level of most nurses is reduced, therefore making nurses have a low social class.
There are various that influence the public’s perception of nurses. Some of these factors include work values, traditional social values, environment, and cultural values. The media, for example, in most cases, show nurses working on the bedside of a patient doing a routine and repetitive work. The work in the perception of the public is seen as the handmaid of a doctor. The traditional social values are the aspects that in the past few centuries, nurses were midwives, which today some stereotypes still see them as such.
The general public should be educated on the roles played by nurses in the changing system of healthcare. The media should play the most crucial part in educating the public and no longer make them invisible. Nurses should also play their role in improving their image to the public, such as improving their communication with the public, whereby maintaining the objective of recruiting new students in the professional. Finally, nurses should be in charge of developing their image and counteract the impacts of nurse stereotyping.