Courtesy of Johnson & Johnson	More NurseWeek Features   Smoke-Free Zone   Nurses and patients tackle nicotine addiction   Bloodless Survival     Surgical techniques to use when transfusion drops out of the equation
Nearly 84 percent of nursing schools with Johnson & Johnson's Campaign for Nursing's Future materials have reported increases in applications and enrollment in the last year.

The people who ultimately will turn around the nursing shortage didn't spend a day in nursing school. They are the geniuses of marketing and advertising programs who are polishing nursing and selling it to teens, those considering second or third careers and nurses themselves.

Take Greta Sherman, managing partner at J. Walter Thompson, the public relations and marketing giant that all but invented product branding. Subsidiary JWT Specialized Communications has 600 hospital clients in the United States and is the not-so-public face behind Nurses for a Healthier Tomorrow, the flagship campaign of 41 nursing and health care organizations to promote nursing careers.

Then there is Nancy Lewin, Johnson & Johnson's executive director of corporate equity, nursing and new ventures. She holds a master's in business administration degree from the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Business and oversees Johnson & Johnson's $20 million Campaign for Nursing's Future.

Sherman and Lewin tell the same story of a profession in need of a boost.

Two years ago, Sherman polled 1,800 school-aged children, 2,000 parents and 350 career coaches and high school counselors. "We look at employee branding like others look at Ford trucks or Kraft Macaroni & Cheese," she said. "What we came away with was not a bad image, but certainly not a good image."

She found a profession that was thought of as weak on men, minorities and opportunity. So Nurses for a Healthier Tomorrow was launched on a shoestring-a couple of dozen organizations with a couple of hundred thousand dollars-and built around an inordinately large number of men and minorities to portray the diversity and breadth of nursing.

"Whenever we would talk to young male students, they just checked out," Sherman said. "Their answer was, 'It's a girl's job.' " Furthermore, "people actually believed there wasn't a lot of ability to move forward in a career in nursing-that you went into nursing and stood at the bedside for 40 years."

Seven print advertisements of RNs explaining the rewards and reasons for their careers include three men and four women, one of them Hispanic and one African American. Their positions range from staff nurse to researcher, advanced practitioner and chief executive.

Plans are to repeat the research in 2004, Sherman said, and tweak the campaign based on the new findings.

Unanswered questions

But still of major concern to her is a confusion about nursing that she blames on the profession itself and which is not easily addressed with media campaigns.

"As a profession, nursing has not grappled with the overriding point that there needs to be one entryway to the profession," Sherman said. That was identified as a "must" in a 1960s position paper on the future of nursing, and "We're here in 2003 and you can go for a two-year, three-year, four-year, even a five-year program and come out sitting for the same exam for the same pay and the same licensure," she said.

So many avenues cloud the image of just who and what a registered nurse is. Consumers, parents, students and their career counselors want the clarity they have with MDs, where the American Medical Association recognizes one level of education that underlies any specialty, Sherman said. "Nursing needs that. There has to be a coming together of what entry level is."

Next Page