Coffee Grounds: A show on nursing in the media

Sandy Summers and Harry Summers
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Coffee Grounds is a lively look at the media's treatment of the nursing profession. Based on our work on this subject since 2001, we talk about everything from Hollywood, to the news, to social media, exploring what we think is good and what we think could be better. Along the way, we'll get into many of the most pressing issues of nursing today, including abusive working conditions, nursing innovations, the criminalization of nursing, and the future of the profession. Join us for coffee, cats, and complaints.

Episodes

  1. 12/24/2025

    Home for Christmas

    If you'd like a Christmasy show to binge for the holidays, we recommend "Home for Christmas." It is a Norwegian show on Netflix that includes a very good nursing portrayal, though the clinical scenes are not the main focus of the show. It is essentially a well-done Christmas romcom. As the third season begins, the main character Johanne interviews for and gets an interim ward manager job, which seems to mean supervising about 10 hospital nurses. Despite resistance from a nurse who wanted the manager job himself, she leads the rest of the staff with her positive, caring spirit and mastery of patient advocacy and psychosocial care. In particular, over the course of the season, she works to persuade a very resistant patient with cardiac sarcoidosis to get needed tests and be open to his family's support, going to great lengths to mend a broken family despite resistance from all around her. Some would say she was crossing a line. But dedicated patient advocates will recognize the quicksand and pushback nurses get from managers, colleagues, patients, and families when they go above and beyond to really meet all the patient's needs. Johanne, not unlike Nurse Jackie, will step outside the system to help a patient or colleague, then charm her way back in. She and her nurses operate with real autonomy – physicians exist and are mentioned as being consulted, but the nurses seem to basically operate without them. Nurses care for patients on their own. We recommend watching the show in Norwegian with English subtitles as we found the dubbed version didn't do justice to the version delivered by the original actors. So check out "Home for Christmas" on Netflix for the holidays and let us know what you think.

    2 min

  2. 10/31/2024

    Nurses call for an end to "sexy nurse" costumes

    As we approach Halloween, we discuss the naughty nurse and killer zombie nurse outfits and stereotypes. We also discuss an article in the Guardian and calls by the Spanish Nursing Council for an end to the naughty and killer / zombie nurse costumes that appear at Halloween. We help listeners explore what can be done about it.

    9 min

  3. 10/22/2024

    2024 Fall Television Preview: Nursing in the Media

    New health-related shows are here, and some have nurse characters. The central character on the NBC mockumentary St. Denis Medical seems to be a senior nurse. And ABC's Doctor Odyssey, set on a cruise ship, actually has two nurse characters. But other new shows seem to fit the physician-centric model of ABC's Grey's Anatomy, especially Fox's Doc and NBC's Brilliant Minds. In any case, good portrayals of nursing will return, on the long-running Call the Midwife (BBC/PBS) and Virgin River (Netflix). October 2024 – This is a transition year for health-related shows on prime time U.S. television, as several new shows arrive in the wake of veteran shows that ended last season. The new show with perhaps the highest potential for some helpful portrayals of nursing may be NBC's new mockumentary St. Denis Medical (Nov. 12). There, the central, narrating character seems to be a beleaguered senior nurse. Producer Ryan Murphy, whose Ratched now looks unlikely to return, is back with ABC's Doctor Odyssey (Sept. 26), about a physician-led health team working on a luxury cruise ship. There are two nurse characters, including a nurse practitioner (NP). Both nurses are highly competent--but the NP badly wants to be a physician, reinforcing the stereotype that that is what nurses dream of. The other new shows look to focus heavily on heroic physicians, with little to no meaningful depiction of nursing, in accord with the Hollywood model. Fox's Doc(premiering mid-season) is a drama about a "brilliant" physician who has lost her recent memory after a brain injury. The showrunner worked on ABC's physician-dominated Private Practice, and the likelihood of a good portrayal of nursing here is low. NBC's Brilliant Minds (Sept. 23) is about a pioneering neurologist based on Oliver Sacks. His team is composed of "brilliant young interns," and there are basically no nurse characters, apart from the petty bureaucrats who occasionally get in the lead physician's way. Overall, note the new shows' focus on "doc" and "brilliant" – never good signs. Among returning shows, Call the Midwife (BBC/PBS; early 2025) will be back for a 14th season about the work of skilled, autonomous nurse-midwives in London, now in 1970. It remains the best show for nursing on U.S. television. Netflix's Virgin River (Dec. 19) whose lead character is a highly competent nurse practitioner (NP) in a small California town, is expected to return for a sixth season in late 2024. And NBC will air, at some point, the fourth season of the Canadian drama Transplant, about a skilled trauma physician from Syria who has started over in Toronto. Physician characters are the focus, though there is a minor NP character who plays an important role in care. Other returning shows include NBC's Chicago Med (Sept. 25), which also focuses on physicians, but has two major nurse characters with real skill and authority. And ABC's Grey's Anatomy (Sept. 26) will continue to offer a vision of hospital care in which physicians do everything that matters. Please join us in encouraging Hollywood to offer more accurate portrayals of nursing!

    23 min
  • 3 Episodes

About

Coffee Grounds is a lively look at the media's treatment of the nursing profession. Based on our work on this subject since 2001, we talk about everything from Hollywood, to the news, to social media, exploring what we think is good and what we think could be better. Along the way, we'll get into many of the most pressing issues of nursing today, including abusive working conditions, nursing innovations, the criminalization of nursing, and the future of the profession. Join us for coffee, cats, and complaints.

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