Best Movies That Reflect Nursing and Why

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One Flew Over Cuckoo’s Nest

The classic Oscar-winning film with Jack Nicholson and the legendary antagonist of Nurse Mildred Ratched is an essential film for anybody who wants to see a nurse, disciplined, devoted to principle and one that can inspire authority over the patients with sheer force of character. It is also a truly thoughtful tale about the extremes to which a nurse should not go and the crossing of the fragile boundary between harshness and sensitivity. Regardless of rules and regulations, it is the patients that are of the highest priority; their improvement and wellbeing, two goals that can only be achieved through compassion and understanding; not through force of any kind.

Shutter Island

A modern horror film, this is one of the darkest type of nurse movies imaginable and the gloomiest approach for the general role of a caretaker of a patient as a whole. It is a film about dealing with damaged, dangerous patients, who pose a threat to themselves and the doctor himself. The film presents the absurd difficulty with which a nurse needs to approach a deeply damaged insane patient. It requires patience for the damaged man to come to terms with reality. It requires sympathy in order to understand the core of the problem and most of all, it requires wits in order to make sure that at the end of the day, the patient survives and continues to lead a normal life. The film encompasses the tremendous responsibility and crushing difficulty of the role of a nurse.

The English Patient

The English Patient is just a story about nursing as it is a story about romance and both stories are heart touching, heart breaking and sensitive as one can imagine. This is no dark material, even if the fates of the heroes are grim. When it comes down to the job of nursing, this film addresses its infinitely softer side; the one in which the nurse is not a hard teacher or a harsh instructor, but a friend, in the full sense of the word, from a romantic partner to a profound source of affection. This is the image of the nurse as the brightest light in the darkest tunnel of a doomed or viciously hurt patient. Themes of responsibility and care for the patient are the primary focus as in all nurse movies, but you are unlikely to see a film in which a nurse is merited with such an angelic, wonderful depiction.

A Beautiful Mind

This is a motion picture that addresses one of the toughest mental diseases in the history of nursing:

schizophrenia and the stress is entirely upon the responsibility to explain the process to the patient and to make him or her understand that there is nothing to fear because everything is a creation of his or her own mind. The difficult task of differentiating reality from fiction in the case of a schizophrenic is a challenge that only a friendly and personal authority figure can handle. The film depicts nurses helping John overcome his illness, but perhaps the biggest revelation of the film comes from Alicia Larde, his long-suffering wife who patiently helps him to understand the real world; though depicted as a familial character and a merely student, many nurses look to Jennifer Connelly’s performance as an ideal model for nursing temperament. Ironically, the real John Nash became intimate with a nurse, with whom he fathered a child. This subplot was left out of the movie, but continues to be a topic of debate for movie buffs and professional nurses.

Here is an extended list of films that explore the job of a nurse:

•The Hospital
•Bad Medicine
•Florence Nightingale
•Awakening
•Medicine Man
•Flatliners
•And many more