Media influences transplant debate
How emergency nurse educates TV producers
The power of television and the news media was radically brought home recently, when erroneous reports on the transplanting of human organs prompted hundreds of phone calls to medical facilities.
Two separate examples of how your patients can be adversely affected by the media hit the airwaves in November, and sent shock waves throughout the transplant community.
A wire service report on a new liver transplant policy said that the recipient’s lifestyle would become a major factor in whether a patient received a liver. Ethicists were quoted as implying that medicine had started down the slippery slope of rationed care.
"Patients on the waiting list for a liver transplant were scared that they would not be transplanted," says Phyllis Weber, executive director of the California Transplant Donor Network in San Francisco, in explaining the dozens of phone calls to her office prompted by the report. "Several of the news stations in town reported that under this new policy patients like Dennis Crosby and Larry Hagman [who are recovering alcoholics] would never have received a transplant. Of course, that is simply not the case," says Weber.
Just four days earlier, the television program Chicago Hope had featured the story of an organ donor who came back to life just before the procurement team was ready to retrieve his organs. "There is just so much of this kind of misinformation out there that it is hard for us to keep track of it," says Toni Webb, director of community affairs for the Washington Regional Transplant Consortium (WRTC) in Falls Church, VA.
But the plethora of misinformation doesn’t stop WRTC professionals from trying to fight back with education. A long-time high school football coach in the Washington area had recently been a transplant recipient and one of WRTC’s education specialists was invited to give a talk on organ donation to the school’s parent group on the day following the CBS drama. The educator used the TV program as a basis for her speech and "opened up a whole discussion about the myths of transplantation," says Webb.
Health care professionals must find a way to influence the news and television producers who are writing and developing today’s news reports and medical dramas and planting seeds of either content or anxiety among patients and family members, say Webb and others.
The difference in how dramatic programs, for instance, affect your daily clinical practice is in whether the show’s staff are interested in accurate portrayals, and whether they have good resources to give them insight into the hospital world.
"During the first season, I talked to the writers and producers seven to 10 times a day," explains Marilyn Rice, RN, MPH, CEN, CNAA, a volunteer consultant to the NBC show ER, and a consultant in northwestern Illinois. Rice is the former president of the Parkridge, IL-based Emergency Nurses Association.
In her role as president of the professional group, Rice was called on to help the show’s writers and always gave them names and umbers of others in the field of emergency medicine. The creative staff of ER strive to give accurate portrayals of emergency room situations and emergency health care professionals, she explains. "There is no doubt that emergency nurses make a difference in this show," she says.
Don’t let television get the upper hand with your patients, advises Rice. "Whatever the condition the patient has they are bound to do some of their own research," she says. "Make sure you ask them what they have learned about a transplant [or other procedure]. Communicate openly with your patient about their perceptions and be open to questions," she urges.
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