Like many nurses, Cathy Ray, MS, RN, loves helping people and educating them about the diseases that affect them. But her path diverges from that of most nurses when it comes to the way she's pursuing this passion-with camera crews and an audience of 590,000.

Ray is an anchor for Channel 13 in Las Vegas, an ABC affiliate. She's one of a select few nurses who is combining her love of nursing with broadcasting. NURSEWEEK interviewed four nurses who work for television, and all share a strong desire to teach the public about health issues. But their nursing backgrounds also give them a qualification that differs from most journalists-the ability to send stories through the filter of their own medical expertise before broadcasting to the public.

"When I do health stories, I know which questions to ask to balance a story," Ray said. "Many health journalists are just using what wire services send, and they don't challenge it."

Ray started to have an inkling that she should combine nursing with television early in her career as an oncology nurse. She'd studied nursing at a school with cutting-edge cancer treatments, but she became disillusioned during her first job after nursing school. The hospital wasn't equipped with advanced cancer treatments and, to her, the unit seemed more like a hospice than a treatment center. Her depression only deepened when her mother was diagnosed with breast cancer.

Eager to find another venue to help people, Ray looked into getting a master's in journalism at Notre Dame. She visited the school's TV station and befriended the station's news director. He encouraged her to volunteer at the station rather than earn another master's degree. During the off hours from her nursing job, Ray started to accompany crews to news shoots and learned how to write for television.

To pay the bills during nursing school, Ray worked as an actress for dinner theater and as a model-experience that came in handy when she auditioned for an opening at the station for a news anchor and health reporter.

Ray landed the job, and thrived in her new position. "To me, broadcasting is teaching," she said. "The viewers are the students. I truly believe what I do is an educational thing."

Her nursing background became a valuable tool for sifting through the plethora of stories that passed through the newsroom. When drug companies sent out stories, for example, she would balance the stories with comments from critics.

Ray also discovered the painful reality of loss while on the job. Once, she did a story about a 19-year-old woman named Tiffany who had discovered a malignant melanoma on her leg. After Tiffany's cancer went into remission, she became a regular visitor to the newsroom. Three years later, though, the cancer returned and she died.

"It was really tough," Ray said. "You develop a personal relationship with people. When people are kind enough to let you into their homes to do a story, it's only natural to develop an affection. When it doesn't work out the way you'd hoped, it is very difficult and painful."

Ray even turned a traumatic situation in her own life into a story. She delivered her son prematurely at 6½ months and spent days in the neonatal ICU. The experience motivated her to create a five-part series featuring neonatal nurses, and the series won a Sigma Theta Tau International award for nursing journalism.

Ready for prime time

Like Ray, Donna Zazworsky's natural sense of stage presence ushered her into a spot on television. Zazworsky, MS, RN, FAAN, was working as a community nurse case manager, and whenever the hospital needed someone to talk to the media, Zazworsky gladly agreed to be interviewed.

"I've never been shy and, throughout my career, I've been happy to talk about it," she said. "The public relations people at the hospital would use me to talk about programs I was involved in. Whenever the TV station approached the hospital, the PR people would suggest that they talk to me."

Her lucky break came two years ago when Channel 4 in Tucson, Ariz., an NBC affiliate, decided to select a team of four medical experts who would work as consultants for health-related stories. The team includes three doctors and one nurse, Zazworsky.

She's done stories on everything from vitamin overdose risks for senior citizens to a feature about the effects of breast cancer on the daughters of women with the disease. She also plugs nursing whenever she has a chance.

"I like getting nursing out there," she said. "I feel it's an opportunity to show people what nurses can do. I've had people tell me that they saw a show I did and they changed their behavior based on the show."
Zazworsky is in charge of two stories a month and frequently adds information to health-related stories on the program.

For her, broadcasting is one of three jobs she juggles. She also works as a program director for home health and outreach at St. Elizabeth of Hungary Clinic, and runs a consulting company that specializes in case and disease management and health promotion.

Shared expertise

Pamelia Butler, JD, MS, RN, also squeezes broadcasting into her full-time job as director of health services for Tulsa (Okla.) Public Schools. Butler produces a 30-minute cable television program called "Health Alert," which is transmitted to 168,000 households. An original new feature is broadcast at 8 a.m., noon and 7 p.m. each Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Reruns of previous shows appear at the same time every Tuesday and Thursday.

She decided to start the program because she believed there was a dearth of medical information available to local residents.

"I wanted to empower them to get the help they need for themselves and their children," Butler said. "On the program, you get local experts, local resources and local people telling how they got a particular disease."

Butler has covered a wide range of subjects, including head lice, depression, laser eye surgery, breast health and anthrax. One of her goals is to teach locals about obscure procedures that may improve their conditions.

One time, she put together a story about uterine fibroid embolization, an alternative to the traditional hysterectomy. In this procedure, doctors inject particles into an artery that cut off the blood supply to a fibroid, which in turn causes it to shrink and die. This way, the uterus does not have to be removed and the recovery time is much shorter.

Like Butler, Arthur Cantos, RN, uses his cable television show to reach local residents, but his niche is even more specific: Filipino Americans. The San Francisco nurse is the anchor of a 30-minute program called the "Filipino American Report" on Channel 32, a channel geared toward immigrants. His show airs from 6 to 6:30 p.m. daily.

Cantos never planned to pursue broadcasting until the producer of the show approached him three years ago. She targeted Cantos because she wanted to launch a health segment on the show, and he was running a study about heart disease in Filipinos at the University of California, San Francisco Medical Center.

Cantos had been working as a nurse manager and noticed that Filipinos seem to suffer from a higher incidence of heart disease than the average patient. The preliminary findings from the study revealed that Filipino-style cooking in the United States includes a high amount of fat and meat. The combination of Filipino cooking with easy access to fast food boosted this group's risk of heart disease, Cantos said.

On the cable show, Cantos started teaching viewers about buying leaner meat, even if it was more expensive, and frying food in olive oil instead of coconut oil.
"Initially, I was rather timid about being on the show," Cantos admitted. "I didn't think I'd have the presence to be able to educate a mass of Filipinos."

He also was challenged by the unpredictability of broadcasting. "In nursing, we try to anticipate things and maintain control, but in broadcasting, you have to be prepared for anything. We have no control over the events that will happen."

But he learned to adjust and began to thrive in his new role on television. One year later, he was promoted to anchor of the show. He's still passionate about helping people and grateful to have a larger audience than one patient at a time.

"We sometimes get feedback from [viewers], and it's so empowering to see that I can make changes in a whole community," he said. "My training in nursing is now being used to educate the Filipino community on a larger scale."

Contact Heather Stringer at heathers@nurseweek.com