Empowering nurses through public voice in Buresh and Gordon's analysis

Silence to Voice

What makes Buresh and Gordon's From Silence to Voice remarkable is that many nurses reading the text will never have conceptualized these issues before. What Buresh and Gordon talk about is true: nurses are not given the kind of recognition they deserve as a distinct profession contributing to the overall gamut of healthcare. What nurses do is undervalued. To remedy this situation, Buresh and Gordon embarked on a whole scale public relations campaign. Distributing media packets and compiling lists of contacts for journalists, the authors set forth to correct the misconceptions about nursing. More importantly, the authors wanted to get nurses to speak up and end the silence that inhibits their own ranks. From Silence to Voice is about empowering nurses and making their role within healthcare more visible.

Chapters One and Two set the stage for the authors' arguments. Chapter One, called "Ending the Silence," presents the problem and its proposed solution. It "envisions the benefits to nurses and to health care if the public knew and understood the importance of nursing," (3). Chapter Two offers more detail about the "systematic, though often unacknowledged conditioning that goes on within nursing to inhibit the kind of public communication that would make nursing known," (3). Both these chapters provide a basic understanding of the phenomenon of silent nurses, and what can be done to empower nurses so they discover and use their collective professional voice. The crux of the issue is that "when medicine is consistently depicted as the center of the healthcare universe, physicians get credit for every contribution to health care, even in those instances when it should go to nursing or another profession," (2). This must change, as nursing is integral to healthcare and is a distinct feature from medicine or any other input to the system.

"The visibility of nurses in the mass media would reflect the expanded participation of nursing in the ongoing public discussion about health care," notes the authors (11). This is important because nurses should be weighing in on the issues that matter in healthcare, including those related to funding and insurance and administration. Without journalistic credibility, nurse input is likely to continue to be demeaned and ignored. If the general public continues to perceive nurses as "just nurses" then the entire system will continue to fail patients.