NURSES are to try to rebrand their profession, updating the old Carry On film image of battleaxe or bimbo to emerge as modern professionals who are as likely to be giving injections as emptying bedpans.

The Royal College of Nursing (RCN) has employed an award-winning documentary cameraman to produce a film, being released this week, which it hopes will alter the public perception of nursing.

The college believes nurses are still seen as either the stern matron figure portrayed by Hattie Jacques in the Carry On films or, at the other extreme, the sex-mad characters played by Barbara Windsor in the same series of movies.

A Mori poll commissioned by the college, to be published alongside its DVD, shows that in the public’s eyes the most famous nurses come from the past, such as Florence Nightingale, the Crimean war nurse, and Edith Cavell, the British nurse executed by the Germans in the first world war. Jacques, who appeared as “matron” in Carry On films in the 1960s and 1970s, is number three.

The highest-ranked modern “nurse” is Charlie Fairhead from the BBC’s long-running drama series Casualty. The RCN believes Fairhead, played by Derek Thompson, has helped to counter traditional stereotypes of male nursing, which used to be seen largely as a job for gay men. Today, one in 10 nurses is male.

“No other profession has an image more at odds with reality,” said Sue Imgrund, an image consultant with Red Spider, the company that worked on the relaunch.

The DVD is being made by Nick Shipley, who worked on the award-winning 1995 Channel 4 documentary about children being abandoned to die in China. It will be used as part of a recruitment drive in schools and colleges and be shown in hospitals to nurses.

The film will detail how nurses’ jobs now require far more medical and technical expertise than previously and how they must act as the “voice and advocate” for the patient, particularly when dealing with doctors.

The college hopes that the film will help dispel nursing’s “yuk” image among schoolchildren for whom it may be associated with traditional roles such as emptying bedpans and dressing wounds.

There are some concerns, however, that the attempt to rebrand nursing may bring a risk of neglecting some of the job’s basic roles.

Claire Rayner, president of the Patients Association and a trained nurse, said she was worried that some members of the profession may be seeing themselves as “ersatz doctors”.

NHS reforms mean some nurses are allowed to administer a range of treatments, including minor surgery, that were previously reserved for doctors.

Rayner, while praising most nurses, has been critical of some who dislike the more menial tasks. “When I was in hospital last year one new staff nurse clearly showed disgust on her face when I was being sick,” she said. “A nurse must never let her patient see her distaste.”

The RCN says that nurses still find their jobs satisfying. A poll has found that more than 70% of Britain’s 640,000 nurses are “very satisfied” with their work, a higher figure than most other professions, including comparable ones such as social workers or teachers. Nine out of 10 do the job because of the pleasure they get from caring for patients.

Jean Gray, the editor of Nursing Standard, which will give away Shipley’s DVD with its May issue, pointed out the need to improve the recruitment of nurses from inside Britain. Currently about half the number of recruits come from overseas.

“The trouble with this is that many of the countries they are coming from cannot really afford to do without them,” said Gray.

“Also, quite a high proportion then go back, so we lose them.” Overall, about one in five nurses leave their jobs each year.

Recent television portrayals of nurses have shown that the RCN still has much to do. In the Channel 4 series No Angels, three of the four nurses are portrayed as sexually voracious and are shown cutting corners and making mistakes.

The drama provoked Beverly Malone, the RCN’s general secretary, to complain that “nurses’ professionalism is being misrepresented”.

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