The scene shows two nurses wheeling a patient through a corridor. The situation is obviously tense, requiring aplomb and grace under fire. But rather than an episode from "ER," it’s an image from a recruitment video that seeks to upend teen-agers’ perceptions about nursing.

The National Student Nurses’ Association released in April the 10-minute short, "Nursing: The Ultimate Adventure," which strives to help combat the nursing shortage by attracting youths at the high school level. Guidance counselors in junior and senior high schools––those who have largely failed even to mention nursing to students––also might find the film eye-opening.

With evidence of a nursing shortage reported in newspapers nationwide, the association sets out to capture the imaginations of teens by offering images beyond administering injections and changing bedpans.

The association, which already has won an award for the video, would like to see it change some ideas that students have about what nursing is and what it can be.

That MTV effect
With fast cuts and shifting locales, the video segment creates a sense of excitement about the field and discusses the emotional effect a nurse can have on patients.

"High school students want some adventure in their life and want some travel in their career," said Diane Mancino, Ed.D., RN, executive director
of the association. "We included [that
discussion] in the video."

"I can travel," one featured student said. "I can work wherever in the world I want to work."

The video short features nursing students talking about the reasons behind their decisions, and offers viewers scenes of nurses at work, set to a rapid, MTV-paced visual style that the association thinks teens will appreciate.

"The interviews were with young people—people who were ready to go to nursing school," Mancino said. "They were the ones who were going to sell it peer to peer."

The video stresses several issues, with special emphasis on the difference that nurses make in people’s lives.

One student said that when you’re dealing with life and death, a patient would remember you forever. People often look to the nurse as an emotional buoy in tense situations. Mancino adds that students often know they want to join the field because they had a positive experience with a nurse as a youngster.

But the video had to go beyond that and address specific opinions that young people have raised in focus groups.

"I think with young people, the image they have of nursing is the old image of bedpans," Mancino said. "Things that
are disgusting, I think especially with teen-agers."

Kids demurred on the topic of nursing for other reasons as well, said Dennis Sherrod, Ed.D., RN, associate director of the North Carolina Center for Nursing, who lent his focus group research to the association.

Teen-agers perceive nurses as working irregular hours, Sherrod said, and lacking autonomy (primarily taking orders from physicians). Nursing as a career choice means bedside care, in one location, probably forever.

"We had to make sure [in the video] that we make them aware that nurses make autonomous decisions on a moment-to-moment basis," Sherrod said.

He thought the image of nursing had to be less monolithic. "When I was working within hospitals," he said, "sometimes they had posters of nurses giving injections. Nurses do that, but we want people to understand that there are other things that nurses do."

He pointed out new opportunities for nurses in research, the pharmaceutical industry and law.

Career competition
Nursing faces other challenges besides image problems. There’s also stiff competition from other career paths. Children who would rather be Michael Jordan or make a mint off the Internet often don’t think about nursing as a viable career trajectory.

Mancino, however, said now is a good time for her organization to redouble its efforts, because the economy is changing.

The recruitment effort comes at a time when nursing shortages are projected to continue. The average age of practicing RNs is 43.3 years, an increase from an average age of 37.4 years in 1983, according to the National Sample Survey of Registered Nurses by the Health Resources and Services Administration’s Bureau of Health Professions. The number of nurses younger than 30 dropped 41 percent between 1983 and 1998, in contrast to a 1 percent drop within the general population.

The video is available to participants in the Breakthrough to Nursing project, a national program started in 1965 as a way to draw more minorities into the field. The video automatically goes to National Student Nurses’ Association chapters that have a Breakthrough to Nursing committee. The association has 600 chapters.

The association’s recruitment committee worked in 1965 to make minority recruitment a national project in the wake of the civil rights movement.

In 1971, the project began to receive federal funding to add target areas and hire field staff. Mancino said that minority recruitment is just as important now as it was then, and that minority involvement in nursing does not reflect that in the overall population.

"What’s happening now in the technology field [outside nursing] is there are a lot of people getting laid off," she said. "The jobs are not as plentiful as they have been. This may frame how people think about their career. Many people don’t realize that there is a technical side to nursing. They can double those two interests."