While nursing is an integral part of the American healthcare system, the nurse as a main character has been overlooked in that most powerful American medium, television. That's about to change though, as Jada Pinkett Smith is set to debut as Christina Hawthorne, chief nursing officer at Richmond Trinity Hospital in Virginia, in TNT's new drama, Hawthorne. The show will be the first with a black nurse as the lead since 1968, when Diahann Carroll starred in the show Julia. According to the St Petersburg Times, the move to add nurses as the focal point of a series is welcomed by Sandy Summers, author of the book Saving Lives: Why the Media's Portrayal of Nurses Puts Us All at Risk. Summers argues that too many hospital shows have physicians doing nursing work instead of the nurses. "They make people think that nursing doesn't take much skill, and that nursing is mostly about getting stuff for physicians," Summers told the Times. "And when nurses are portrayed as unskilled, we can't get the funding we need to hire them." Experts continue to project a nursing shortage in the future. Dr Peter Buerhaus, an expert in the field, projects that by 2025, the nursing shortage could be nearly 500,000 people.  |