Naughty nurses

The mainstream media is forever insulting nurses by portraying them as sex kittens. The picture above was taken from a recent edition of the The Sun.

One can only be grateful for the American based Center for Nursing Advocacy which performs a valuable service in combating this tawdry stereotyping.

"The Center for Nursing Advocacy seeks to increase public understanding of the central, front-line role nurses play in modern health care. The focus of the Center is to promote more accurate, balanced and frequent media portrayals of nurses and increase the media's use of nurses as expert sources."

And here are but two of their recent campaigns:

After five months of effort, we have persuaded Colorado brewer Coors to stop using "naughty nurse" imagery in its "Coors Light Trauma Tour."

November 29, 2006 -- Over the last two days, the U.K. tabloid the Sun has run a prominent "naughty nurse" pictorial. The Sun is the most popular English-language daily in the world, with an estimated 7.8 million readers. The theme of its lingerie pictorial is that the models really are nurses. Unlike the paper's regular Page 3 feature, this one stops short of nudity. The light soft-porn text is credited to Lucy Hagan. The pictorial promotes sales of a calendar called "100% Real Nurses 2007."

Sadly, their campaign against the appalling "Heart Attack Grill", which uses scantily clad waitresses dressed as nurses, has so far not been successful. Indeed, the campaign has backfired. The Heart Attack Grill is fighting back and, indeed, capitalising on the publicity.

There is worse to come. Dr Crippen is most grateful to a regular commentator for drawing his attention to a web-site that contains the largest assembled collection of light soft porn pictures of naughty nurses currently available on the internet.

The Center for Nursing Advocacy should re-deploy its resources from the Heart Attack Grill and take immediate action to have this appalling site suppressed. Dr Crippen would not dream of reproducing any of the disgraceful photographs from this site, but those of you who are curious may care to look here, here, here, here and here.

In the meantime, nurses and others who want a sensible assessment of this problem should look at the irrepressibly Saucy Kim. Kim hails from San Francisco and is a full-time ER nurse, but in her spare time…