GW researchers from the School of Nursing last month published findings from a workshop they piloted in 2021 to help nurses boost their outreach to news media organizations.
Richard Ricciardi, the associate dean of the School of Nursing, partnered with the American Organization for Nursing Leadership’s public relations team to develop a workshop that equips nurses with the skills they need to reach out to and interact with news organizations. Ricciardi said the program raised chief nursing officers who participated in the workshop’s awareness of the essential role they play in ensuring health care policy is accurately articulated in news media.
“My role is one to help nurses do a better job of advancing the voice of nursing, but it’s also helping media professionals to understand what we do and understand health care better so that their stories can be written from a broader perspective, where they include physicians, they include nurses, they include physical occupational therapists,” Ricciardi said.
Despite being the largest workforce in health care, nurses are only sourced in four percent of health news stories, a statistic unchanged since 1997, according to a study by the Sigma Theta Tau International Honor Society of Nurses.
Fourteen chief nursing officers from the American Organization for Nursing Leadership participated in a two-day virtual workshop in fall 2021 and subsequent monthly sessions throughout spring 2022. Researchers then performed follow-up interviews about the strategies the nurses learned to effectively articulate their role in health care in the news media and asked nurses how they had implemented them in the workplace.
The workshop covered how nurses can build relationships with journalists, communicate their work to reporters and collaborate with organizations’ public relations departments to help with strategic, proactive messaging as opposed to waiting for journalists to contact them. The workshop also advised nurses to have a meeting with the public relations departments in their workplace and educated the PR teams on what issues nurses can provide expert commentary on in the media.
Ricciardi said the researchers and the AONL will continue to host workshops in 2025 and 2026 with more attendees, adding that they are considering conducting the sessions in both a virtual and in-person format.
“They also cared about what we were studying,” Ricciardi said of AONL. “They had a great deal of interest because they really understood that these chief nurse executives, or chief nurses, perhaps didn’t have the skill set or really weren’t putting on what we like to say, the radar screen, or was it on their priority list, the idea of getting nurses out there?”
The workshop also asked chief nursing officers to identify nurses in their workplace that have expertise in certain medical fields and create a “media ready” list, so they have people ready to volunteer when media opportunities arise.
The results compiled main themes from the interviews conducted with the nursing officials after the workshops and identified that the officials felt they had more awareness of the responsibility they have as leaders in their sector to ensure nurse’s voices are centered in health care policy news.
“The program forced me to think intentionally about preparing nurses for media encounters, and not just waiting for [PR] to come to you, but identifying when you should go to them,” one participant said in the article.
Ricciardi said the nursing officers always had the capacity to engage with the media but had previously not been given the resources and instruction needed to do so. He said researchers found from the follow-up interviews that once nurses gained practical interview skills, they were able to lead communications at their workplace.
“They really were good,” Ricciardi said. “Once we gave them the time and worked with them to develop the communication strategy, they just went into their gear as leaders. They know how to do that.”
Beverly Hancock, an assistant professor at the Rush University School of Nursing and former AONL employee, helped recruit people for the workshop and said the published results focus on the pilot Zoom workshops conducted with chief nursing officers, most of which already had some media training but still felt they needed to learn more about strategic messaging.
“We kind of hand selected the people to be in it because we wanted to learn from them as well, like what was meaningful,” Hancock said. “So these were all, you know, people that were, they were all in executive leadership, meaning, they were the chief nurse of a hospital.”
Hancock said the workshop provided an intentional space for nurse executives to focus on something new and different, coming out of the workshop with a strategic plan to engage with the media.
“The nurses were going in, caring for the patient, gathering the information and conveying it to the rest of the team. And yet, nurses were not the ones who were speaking to the media because the PR departments didn’t, or the journalists didn’t go to nurses. So that was really a lot of the workshop time was talking about, ‘What are those ways?’” she said.
