This content is associated with The Open University's Nursing and Healthcare courses and qualifications.

Stereotypes of nursing

Have you ever considered how accurate career representations for nursing are portrayed in the media? You’d expect it to be pretty accurate, right? 

Wrong. The media portrayal of nursing is not only outdated but incorrect. This is not only damaging to the public’s expectations (of nursing), but also it does not entice people to want to become nurses and join a highly skilled and valued career. Let me explain. 

From a public perspective, navigating healthcare can be difficult, including understanding the roles and responsibilities of the many health professionals (Garcia, 2020). People rely on schemas (or cognitive representations) to aid understanding, often drawn from stereotypes. If a person has limited exposure to healthcare, they will draw from their brain’s bank of schemas to help them understand. Media representations inform peoples’ schemas. 

However, stereotypes are inaccurate representations and can be unhelpful. This is seen in nursing, where media representations of nursing are inaccurate and have drawn from a range of stereotypes (Jang and Kim, 2018). For example, the media continually portrays nurses as ‘handmaidens’ to doctors, rather than acknowledging the highly trained and skilled independent practitioners that they are (Hill, 2017). Other unhelpful images include ‘angels’ (Finkelman and Kenner, 2013) and nursing being predominately a white female workforce (Clayton-Hathway et al., 2020). 

Unless a person has experienced nursing care first-hand (from an insider perspective), they are unlikely to know and properly understand the role and responsibilities and will draw from their (inaccurate) schema (from an outsider perspective). This means that they use false stereotypes to inform perceptions and decision-making. This cycle is perpetuated through false stereotypes of nursing seen in the media, by journalists with a poor understanding of nursing.

Attracting people to the nursing profession 

The NHS is the largest employer in Europe with nursing making up 29% of the total workforce (The Nuffield Trust, 2024). Over the last 5 years, there has been a decline in applications to nursing courses in the United Kingdom (Church, 2024) and, at the time of writing in 2024, there are nearly 35,000 nursing vacancies in the UK (NHS Digital, 2024). The future of the nursing profession and healthcare workforce depends on attracting enough people to train to become nurses. However, to achieve this, nursing needs to be accurately represented by the media to demonstrate the complex, highly skilled profession that it is, encompassing the wide range of diverse paths that a nursing career may take. Through more accurate representations of nursing, the media can go a long way to help support attracting people from local communities, individuals from the global majority, and men who currently make up a small percentage (12%) of the nursing workforce. 

The NHS Workforce Plan (NHS England, 2023) has proposed ambitious NHS workforce development. However, the success of this depends not only on adequate funding and infrastructure but also on members of the public being attracted to the nursing profession and accurately understanding what the role entails. For this to be achieved, nursing bodies and the media will need to work together to ensure nursing is properly represented in the news and features, and that the media takes an active move away from perpetuating unhelpful stereotypes of nursing.