Nursing and the Media: Raising Nurses’ Voices | The Nurse Keith Show, EPS 256

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On episode 256 of The Nurse Keith Show, Nurse Keith interviews Barbara Glickstein, RN, MPH, MS — a public health nurse, health reporter, and media strategist — regarding the woeful underrepresentation of nurses and the nursing profession in the media and how we must do better.

Barbara Glickstein is the founder of Barbara Glickstein Strategies, a training company in media, leadership and advocacy skills. She was co-investigator of the 2018 Woodhull Revisited Study: Nurses’ Representation in Health News Media Twenty Years Later and Journalists’ Experiences with Using Nurses as Sources in Health News Stories reporting that 20 years later nurses remain invisible in health news reporting.

Barbara produces and hosts HealthCetera, a podcast that provides evidence-based health news, analysis and commentary. She’s the Media Strategist for Carolyn Jones Productions and worked on the documentaries The American Nurse and Defining Hope. Glickstein was selected to participate in Take the Lead’s 50 Women Can Change the World in Journalism 2019. She’s committed to changing the health narrative to reflect more diverse voices in health news.

The Woodhull Study is a crucial piece of research regarding nurses’ roles in the media. From the George Washington University website:

Diversity is key to good journalism in a pluralistic society — whether diversity of topics, journalists or sources. Women continue to be underrepresented in newsrooms (24 percent) and as expert sources in news stories (36 percent). Although women are included as sources in 48 percent of health news stories, the Woodhull Study on Nursing and the Media: Health Care’s Invisible Partner, published in 1998, found that nurses were identified as sources in only 4 percent of quotes or other sourcing in health news stories in leading print national and regional newspapers and 1 percent in weeklies and industry publications such as Modern Healthcare in September of 1997. Nurses were never cited in health news stories on policy and were rarely identified in photos accompanying the articles. Named after Nancy Woodhull, a founding editor of USA Today, the study raised awareness that the voices and perspectives of the nation’s largest group of health professionals — now 3.5 million, almost 90 percent of whom are women — were largely invisible even when they would have been germane to the story. 

Connect with Barbara: 

• Barbara Glickstein Strategies
• Facebook
• Twitter
• LinkedIn

This episode of The Nurse Keith Show is sponsored by Incredible Health, where hospitals apply to nurses instead of the other way around. You can create a profile in about 3 minutes and then sit back and relax as the interview requests for permanent jobs come to you.

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