"Scrubbing In": Real People versus Reality Television

I will be the the first to admit that I am not a woman without by biases. When I first heard about "Scrubbing In" from a classmate about a month before its premiere, I was quick to sign the Change.org petition for its cancellation out of absolute indignation. I have spent the past two years of my life in nursing school. I have given most most semblance of a social life. I have spent days seeing so much suffering and sadness and pain that the last thing I want to do after a day on the floor is go out and get plastered. Even as a student, I have seen so much sadness that all I want to do is go home and hug the people I love, have a nice dinner with them, and sleep in my own bed in my own pajamas, because I realize just how lucky I am to be able to do any of those things - many of the patients I've worked with don't have the luxury. Many of them don't even have those things.

My first reaction when I saw the preview for "Scrubbing In" was... how dare they? I wasn't sure if I was angry at the nurses on the television set, or at MTV. I just knew that I was angry at something about this show, and that I was genuinely hurt that it was making a caricature of a profession that I was working so hard to get into.

Fast forward about a month. I decided that I would try to watch the show - weeks after its original air date, because I didn't want to contribute to its live viewership - to see if there was any possibility that the show could be redeemed. After all, I had looked up the cast members on the BRN license verification website. They are real nurses. They had been through nursing school, just like what I'm going through right now. They had learned about the struggle for nursing to be taken seriously.

When I turned on my television set, I realized what MTV was doing - exploiting real people, the way it always does nowadays. Hello, Teen Mom stars, I'm talking about you.

"Scrubbing In" takes real people - real nurses - and does what MTV is extremely good at in its reality shows: chopping and screwing footage to put people into neat little archetypal packages in order to tell a sensationalized story.

There is a lot of talk about the cast themselves - and yes, some of their behavior shown on the show has been less than amazing, to say the least. Telling a patient with suicidal thoughts to "stop thinking about all this stupid stuff" is not therapeutic. Flinging baby powder at each other in the supply room is waste of hospital resources. Practicing IV's on a coworker is a violation of hospital policy and a liability risk. But the "shame on you" goes more towards the show's producers than towards the cast. After all, haven't we all had moments where we realized, "Oh, god, I could have spoken to that patient so much more effectively, but I blanked out!", or "Dude. Why did I do that?"

It's part of the process of socialization into nursing practice, even for experienced nurses when they are coming to a new facility, starting from scratch, and I think that's something that a real nursing reality show could better address.

These are the parts of the cast's day that MTV wants you to see. "Scrubbing In" is carefully chopped and screwed to portray real people as characters - the redneck, the ghetto fab diva, the snooty white girl, and so on. If you read between the lines, you can see snippets of truth about real struggles in nursing practice - but you shouldn't need to read between the lines in a show that's supposed to be about nurses.

A show about nurses needs to communicate with nurses in order to see what part of their lives the public needs to know about - not what will get ratings and viewers. A real show about nursing needs to address real questions and problems that nurses face:

How do nurses cope with stress in healthy ways that don't involve drinking or irresponsible behavior?
What safety nets are in place to help new nurses who still need orientation to a new facility's policies and equipment?
Why do experienced nurses "eat their young"?
How do hospitals determine patient assignments and staffing ratios?
How are nurses and other staff members trained to deal with special populations such as homeless, immigrant, disabled, or drug-abusing individuals?

I have faith that the cast members, as licensed nurses in the state of California, see these things - they must think about them and cope with them. They must talk about them. They must feel strongly about them. But this is not what MTV shows us, and this is the problem.

"Scrubbing In" portrays nursing as just a job that goes away once you clock out, and that is the deepest cut of all - because nurses, and even nursing students, know that even if you don't get to take your work home with you, it's still there. As human beings, as people who see people at their lowest and are their primary source of compassion, these things don't simply get left at the sliding glass door of the hospital so you can go out and party. And that is what needs to be addressed in a show about nurses.

I see that. Numerous professional nursing associations see that. I'm sure even the cast of "Scrubbing In" sees that. But MTV executives most certainly do not.