Nursing Realities
Boston RNs take stage in TV documentary

By Lisette Hilton
November 1, 2004

Nurses at Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, will be the featured players in an hour-long reality-type TVprogram this week on the Discovery Health Channel. Nursing Diaries is scheduled to air at 10 PMSunday.

Creator Richard Kahn, an independent producer- filmmaker, says he set out to make a film that focuses on nursing and that would be different than traditional patient- and physician-centered programs. Kahn, who has done a number of health care films and is married to a nurse, says his interest in nursing comes from his belief that nurses are an essential piece of health care.

“I don’t think people recognize what nurses do until they’re patients,” he says.

The program includes three stories, Kahn says: One is the portrait of a nurse in the neonatal ICU. The story follows her as she cares for a premature low-birthweight baby, born at 25 weeks. It shows the nurse’s relationship with the baby and family while they were in the NICU.

The second portrait is of a nurse dyad: a preceptor and a new graduate in the surgical ICU. Mass General has a program in which new nursing school graduates go through a six-month preceptor program to work in the ICU. Kahn followed the two nurses for months before filming and during the three weeks of filming until the new graduate was on her own in the unit.

The third segment, filmed in the surgical coronary care unit, looks at the care that three nurses provided together to a patient with several vascular problems that complicated his care and kept him in the unit for several weeks.

“He had some lifestyle issues that were causing his vascular issues,” Kahn says. “The nurses gave him another way to look at his life without imposing [judgment].”

Marianne Ditomassi, RN, executive director for patient care services operations at Mass General, says the nurses worked closely with Kahn during the planning and filming of Nursing Diaries. “We were really lucky to have the opportunity to work with a videographer who gets it — really understands the science and art of nursing,” Ditomassi says. “He has seen nursing portrayed for years in the media in a less favorable way. It was his vision to capture and record and make more visible what nursing practice is and make more visible the critical thinking that occurs as a nurse goes about providing the care.”

Kahn spent months just observing the units, Ditomassi says, and developed relationships with nurses and gained their trust.

“By the time he started carrying the camera around, he was an integral part of the team,” Ditomassi says. “It was an exciting time. Nurses thought it was an opportunity for them to showcase their practice.”

After nurses watch the film, Kahn says he would like them to feel that nursing has been paid the attention it deserves and has been portrayed as a profession in which people are highly trained and have serious responsibilities.

Ditomassi says the film is a milestone in nursing because it fosters a positive and realistic view of what nursing is. “We want to make sure that when we get older, there are nurses to take care of us. This is just one other positive way to get a strong message out about how rewarding a career nursing can be,” she says.

Diana Grobman, RNC, BSN, one of the nurses featured in the program and a seasoned nurse in the neonatal ICU at Mass General, says she hopes the film succeeds in portraying nurses in a way that “the public can truly see what we do on an hour-to-hour and minute-to-minute basis — and what a difference we make in patients’ and families’ lives.”

Lisette Hilton is a freelance health care reporter.