What People Get Wrong About Nurses

Public perception of nursing is weird. People either picture a smiling angel in scrubs or some background extra behind the doctor in a medical drama. They don’t see what it’s like to chart for two hours after a 12-hour shift, manage nine patients, or get screamed at by a post-op client coming out of anesthesia. That gap between the image and the job is what keeps nurses burned out and invisible.

How TV Shows and Movies Mislead People About What Nurses Really Do

TV shows and movies do nurses dirty. Most of the time, the character labeled “nurse” gets five lines, then vanishes. And when they do show up, it’s to hand a chart to a doctor, flirt, or yell something dramatic like “We’re losing her!” In real life, we’re the ones doing compressions, pushing the meds, calling the code, and explaining it all to the family after. Nobody’s yelling “stat” or trying to shock a flatline.

TV stereotypes feed the lazy idea that nurses are just doctor’s assistants. And honestly, some days it feels like that’s how the system sees us too. During day shifts, physio rolls in and acts like we’re their hands-on help, dragging patients out of bed on their schedule like we’ve got nothing else going on.

That assistant image bleeds into everything: pay, staffing, policies, and public assumptions. It’s part of why we’re always short-staffed. Never mind that we all hold university degrees and carry the legal title of Registered Nurse. People still act like we’re disposable. Hospitals have tried to replace us. It didn’t go well.

Even Gallup ranks nurses as the most trusted profession year after year. But that trust rarely turns into real respect.

Short-Staffed Nursing Is Putting Patients at Risk and Burning Nurses Out

In hospitals, floor nurses are swamped. Five patients used to be the safe standard on a med-surg floor. Now it’s normal to hear about nurses juggling eight or more.

Back when I was a floor nurse, about twenty years ago, I had eleven patients on one shift. They weren’t ICU cases, but I was still responsible for every med and every chart. And I wasn’t even staff. I was agency. One patient was confused and kept trying to climb out of bed. Another was vomiting. Some needed HIV meds I’d never even heard of at the time, others needed insulin, and two families were standing at the desk asking why their parent hadn’t been changed in hours.

That didn’t include calling pharmacy, chasing down doctors who didn’t pick up, or dealing with a senior nurse who dumped her patients on me so she could “supervise” from the lounge. The rest of us just made it work. As long as nobody died who wasn’t supposed to, no one cared if we were running on fumes, hungry, or even made it to the bathroom to relieve our bursting bladders.

In IntelyCare’s 2024 report, 75.8% of nurses said they felt burned out. Over 60% were looking after nine or more patients at once. Better staffing ranked higher than pay as their top concern.

So what’s the public perception?

Nurses sitting at the desk, sipping coffee, chatting, scrolling, and taking a few vitals. No rush. No stress. Just hanging around.

What’s the reality?

No meals, full bladders, 15,000 steps by midafternoon, and going home wondering what we forgot or didn’t get to.

Why Nurses Skip Breaks, Meals, and Self-Care Just to Keep Up

If you want to see raw human behavior, stand next to someone waking up from anesthesia. You’ll see sobbing, panic, and sometimes full-blown aggression. People process trauma in weird ways. Some call out for relatives who’ve died. Some ask if they’re dead. Others lash out.

In recovery, nurses sit with all of it: fear, euphoria, confusion, while watching every breath and making sure the patient doesn’t crash. Think a boob job is just about vanity? Watch a woman wake up groggy and panicked, clutching her chest and yelling her breasts are too small while she’s still flat and half-conscious.

We take in all that emotion, absorb it, and push through the rest of the 12-hour shift without time to reflect or even figure out how we feel.

A September 2023 review called “Time and life is fragile” pulled together 36 studies from 20 countries about how nurses respond to patient deaths in critical care. What came up again and again: grief, crying alone in closets or hallways, then going right back to work.

We show some emotion, but not too much. Break down too far and people think you can’t handle the job. So we carry it from shift to shift, patient to patient. Then we go home and try to act like nothing happened.

The Abuse Nurses May Face Every Day and Still Show Up to Work

Back when I worked in Neuro and Trauma ICU, I watched a lot of UFC just to learn how to counter punches. Some confused patients could turn on you without warning. One second you're adjusting an IV line, the next—bam, a punch to the gut.

Year ago, a patient swung on me, but I was standing on the side of his non-dominant hand and caught his fist mid-air in the palm of my hand. Pure reflex saved my teeth. Not everyone’s that lucky.

Workplace violence is a daily reality for nurses in both the U.S. and Canada. A 2023 National Nurses United survey found that over 81% of nurses had been verbally threatened or physically assaulted on the job.

Texas nurses, in particular, are expected to take the abuse and keep moving. A 2024 report from the Texas Center for Nursing Workforce Studies showed that 72.7% of nurses experienced verbal abuse, and about one-third faced physical assault, threats, or sexual harassment.

Then comes the so-called “learning moment.” Managers love those. In Emergency, a nurse gets grabbed by the throat by a substance user who got Narcan from the paramedics and feels robbed of their high, and the follow-up is ridiculous. “What could you have done differently?” As if violence is just part of the deal. As if you should’ve seen it coming or handled it better.

In Long-Term Care, Short Staffing Means Dignity Comes Last

In nursing homes, the math doesn’t add up. One nurse, maybe two aides, and dozens of residents. You know someone’s going to wait too long sitting in pee or worse. You know someone’s going to fall. And it’s not because staff are lazy or careless, it’s because nursing home systems are designed to scrape by with the bare minimum of staff.

A RN in a nursing home isn’t the one doing most of the turning, bathing, or toileting. That work usually falls to Personal Support Workers (PSWs) in Canada or Certified Nursing Assistants (CNAs) in the U.S. The RN is responsible for handling meds, writing up care plans, updating family, calling the doctor for issues, managing pressure ulcers, charting incidents, and supervising a skeleton crew.

The PSWs or CNAs have the unenviable task of repositioning 20–30 residents every two hours. On top of that, they have to try getting everyone fed, bathed, changed, and sitting up during the day or back to bed at night when they’ve got half the staff they need. Long-term care nursing often feels like rationing dignity. You do what you can. You apologize for what you can’t, and get over it.

A 2021 Human Rights Watch report describes how understaffing led to preventable deaths and widespread neglect. One aide said she had 12–15 residents when the safe number was just 7–8, forcing her to rush meals and skip hygiene care.

All a nurse can do in this type of situation is document missed care or unsafe conditions to protect themselves and the team legally. Reporting staffing concerns or patterns of neglect caused by a lack of staffing to management or higher-ups go nowhere.

Behind the Scrubs: What Nurses Want You to Know

We don’t need to be called heroes. We need safe staffing. We need breaks. We need fair pay. And we need people to stop asking, “Have you thought about med school?” like that’s some kind of compliment.

We want people to stop assuming nurses are supposed to be nice all the time. We’re skilled. We’re trained. We make critical decisions. We carry legal risk because we have a license we have to maintain every year. And we do all of it while being underpaid, overworked, and expected to stay calm when someone’s screaming in our face.

When people say “just a nurse,” it tells us everything. They don’t see the fast thinking. They don’t see the emotional labor or the clinical judgment. They see the scrubs, and that’s it.

It’s time to stop calling us angels or heroes and start respecting us as professionals.

If the public wants to support nurses, it starts with seeing us realistically. We’re not extras in the background. We’re the ones who held your mother’s hand while she passed away. Who managed a hallway full of patients. Who got punched and still came back the next day. Who just want to take a break without being interrupted or made to feel guilty for it.

That’s what nursing really feels like. It’s time people knew.

Originally written for Medium. Edited for my Hashnode readers.

If any of this hits close to home, whether you’re a nurse like me, or just someone trying to survive a messy job, this book is for you. It breaks down what burnout really is, what causes it, and how to take your energy back. Not just to survive, but to win when you go all in with your eyes open.

Grab your copy of:📘Burnout to Balance: Your 8-Step Guide to Thriving in a Messy Workplace

• eBook & Paperback on Amazon

• eBook on Google Books

• Audiobook for easy listening on the go

• 🎧Want to sample it out for free? Listen to Burnout to Balance 2025 Podcast on Spotify.

www.burnouttobalanceguide.com

New posts on job burnout, stress, mental health, wellness, and toxic job recovery every week. Hit follow if you’re into that.👣

Sign up to the email list.