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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
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