March 28, 2024

SchellenbergerCaseypromoBY CASEY SCHELLENBERGER

The Ontario Nurses’ Association (ONA) is urging people to sign a petition calling for the cancellation of a new MTV reality TV show featuring nurses. Scrubbing In, which premiered on Oct.  24, follows the lives of several travel nurses working in an Orange County, Calif. hospital. A letter, written by the ONA president, was in direct response to the trailer, which showed the nurses drinking, dancing and streaking as well as them in their professional lives. Linda Haslam Stroud wrote in the letter that the trailer showing this behaviour as “reality” was “highly offensive and degrades the professionalism and dedication of all nurses.”

“The  nurses  portrayed  in the show present as sexual objects, exploit negative stereotypes and diminish the fact that we are knowledgeable health-care professionals who make the difference between life and death for patients every day,” Haslam Stroud wrote Rebecca Nielsen, a second- year practical nursing student, said, “As a nursing student, I don’t agree with it (the show). It makes me and my colleagues look bad. “I feel like that if you’re a nurse, no matter where you are, you need to be showing some level of professionalism. It’s not Jersey Shore, it’s a nursing profession.”

The petition, which origi- nally asked that MTV cancel the premiere, is now asking that MTV “consider taking this grossly inaccurate dramatization off of the air.”  As of Oct. 28, it had 22,451 signatures with a goal of reaching 25,000.

Nielsen, who signed the petition, doesn’t think it will work “because there is going to be enough people watching it.” The petition can be found at change.org/petitions/mtv-cancel-scrubbing-in.