Nursing is a scientific discipline, a public health infrastructure, and a body of knowledge built at the intersection of biology, behavior, community, and systems. Nurses are in schools and boardrooms, in legislatures and laboratories, in emergency rooms and living rooms, at bedsides and borders. They are scientists, researchers, entrepreneurs, policymakers, and the profession most consistently present at the places where health breaks down, and society falls short. And yet, according to decades of research on nursing’s portrayal in media and public life, the public picture of nursing remains stubbornly narrow and stripped of the analytical authority that makes nursing expertise genuinely irreplaceable.
That gap is not a communications problem. It is a policy issue, a resource issue, and a patient safety concern. According to two replication studies of the landmark Woodhull Study on Nursing and the Media, nurses are cited as sources in just 2% of health news stories and nearly never in coverage of health policy. This means the perspective closest to the gaps in care, closest to what patients actually experience, and closest to workable solutions goes unheard. What is lost, as the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine concluded in their 2021 report on the future of nursing, is not just recognition. It is a way of seeing: the whole person within a family, a community, an environment, a system. A trained, scientific, evidence-based way of seeing that, as Buresh and Gordon argue in From Silence to Voice, no other profession replicates at scale.
In this episode, guest host Lisbeth Votruba, a third-generation nurse and Chief Clinical Officer at Avishur, talks with filmmakers, photographer Carolyn Jones, and producer Lisa Frank, the team behind the 2012 book and documentary series The American Nurse Project. Jones and Frank share what they discovered after more than a decade of interviewing and photographing nurses across every setting, from Appalachian home health to prison hospices to labor and delivery wards, and why it took two outsiders to help nurses articulate what they do and why it matters. They discuss how personal storytelling unlocks what statistics cannot, how nurse-led initiatives have measurably improved outcomes in maternal health and end-of-life care, and why telling the full, true story of nurses is essential to fixing the systems we all rely on.