Celebrating National Nurses Week

If you have ever been sick and had to be in the hospital or had to have nursing home care you will know the value of nurses and health care professions. They put in tireless hours with the goal of helping their patients. 2020 into 2021 the value of nurses and healthcare professions have only been brought more to the forefront with the pandemic.

Every year the world sets aside a week in early May to recognize nurses for their tireless dedication. It is called National Nurses Week. It begins each year on May 6th and ends on May 12th, which is the anniversary of famous nurse Florence Nightingale's birthday. May 12th is also dedicated as International Nursing Day in Honour of Nightingale.

Nightingale, who lived from 12 May 1820 to 13 August 1910, was a nurse but also a social reformer and widely known as the founder of modern nursing. She became known as “The Lady with the Lamp” after helping wounded soldiers in the Crimean War and later established the Nightingale School of Nursing at St. Thomas’ Hospital in London, England.

The World Health Assembly designated 2020 the “International Year of the Nurse and the Midwife” to honor the 200th anniversary of Florence Nightingale's birth and to advance nurses' vital role in transforming health care around the world.

Nurses and healthcare workers have always had a special place in the hearts of the iFilmGroup founders. Because of that special place in their hearts, healthcare workers have played a big role in several productions that the iFilmGroup team has made.

“I have always wanted to do stories with nurses in them. But it has always been a matter of how to do them justice within the stories” says director and writer Matthew Marshall. He finds the role nurses play in the well-being of people on so many levels is something the public overlooks. “Nurses and medical support like PSWs have some rough conditions within their jobs, yet they perform such an important role. Doing them justice in a film has always been my concern,” adds Marshall.

The 2016 film “Ronny’s Bench” was the first time the iFilmGroup Production team put a medical staff member on screen. Helena Rose and Kaylah Hope Felker played Mental Health staff from a Psychiatric Hospital in which a patient (Jamie Rainbird) had escaped from. It was a brief role but it was the start of the production team exploring how to work roles dealing with nurses and medical staff into the films they were making.

Next in the chronological filming order came Matthew Marshall’s joint project with Helena Rose called “Blue Love”. The film dealt with a nurse who is in an abusive marriage and is trying to balances love and her passion for helping people as a nurse.

It was sparked by creating a role for Helena Rose to stretch herself as an actor. With some research, Marshall and Rose discovered that Nurses endure an overwhelming amount of abuse both at work and at home. A high percentage of nurses suffered from at least one kind of violence. Generally at work enduring either physical or verbal assault from patients. Sometimes both. But the more startling fact was that many nurses endure more than one form of violence. Sometimes both at work and home. Forms of violence include; verbal abuse, verbal threats, physical violence, sexual abuse, sexual harassment, and ethical harassment.

Nursing is one of the most women-centered professions and is impacted by violence on several fronts. The nature of duty and work schedules of nurses are unique that can have distinct implications for their family life experiences with marital partners. This information was the birth of the “Blue Love” storyline.

Helena Rose was cast as the lead character Kaitlyn Butler who is trying to balance her marriage and her career as a nurse. When the story picks up we can see the result and it has left Kaitlyn in a bad place. It was important to the team to make sure they had scenes within a hospital for that authentic nurse feel. “One of the biggest hurdles of filming a film about nurses is getting into a hospital location or a hospital-like setting. With privacy laws and restrictions, unless you’re on a Hollywood set it’s hard to film hospital scenes. But the “Blue Love” production team pulled it off.

“We were able to film in a hospital ward, hospital hallway, a maternity wardroom, and a clinic setting”. This adds to the film’s authenticity under the direction of Matthew Marshall. This coupled with the scenes of the lead characters' personal life creates a very powerful story.

Marshall and Rose also tied in mental health which is an important topic to both of them. The lead character tells her story through memories and flashbacks while talking to her therapist.

“The film takes you on a journey through the mind of the lead character and what she is going through,” says Rose.

After filming was finished the film and headed to post-production, the film progress was paused while the team found an editor. The team then progressed to another film where nurses and the medical profession played a huge role even if those characters were not the lead characters. The Nurses and PSWs played a huge role in this new film called “Not Ready”.

“Not Ready” is about Professor Richard Pratt who is working to bring closure in aspects of life as he prepares for his death from cancer. The storyline opened a door to feature nurses and PSWs in a home environment as the team looked at aspects of palliative care surrounding a dying man with the best of medical professionals to give him the most peaceful environment to spend his dying days.

This got filming away from a hospital setting. This setting allowed the team to focus on nursing in the home by Registered Nurses and the duties that PSWs offer in aspects of home care. This opened the door to the discussion of the similarities and differences between Nurses and PSWs.

What comes out of it was how much PSWs are the second line of healthcare provision right behind nurses in caring for patients. PSWs don’t always have the hands of medical care of the patient. But they take care of aspects within the home that help support the patient's well-being.

This second line of health care imagery is interesting from the aspect of May 19th being PSW Day. This date follows closely on the heels of National nurse’s week and Nurses day. But it shows that a day needs to be set aside for PSWs as they hold an important role in the healthcare foundation of patient care. The Ontario PSW Association 2021 has formally declared May 17th to May 21st PSW Week.

PSWs are the backbone of the health system and approximately 35% of all PSWs in Ontario work in the home and community sector, delivering a range of vital services that reduce the need for more expensive hospital care, emergency room visits, or long-term care. “Not Ready” showcased this in the many people who played PSWs within the film performing various duties to help the homestead.

The film visually shows nurses and PSWs working side by side taking care of the professor as he deals with his illness in a home environment. ‘We had a great team of individuals who played nurses and PSWs in the film. “They were always in the background and became a bigger part of the film than I expected,” says Marshall, who was the director of Not Ready.

This rings true to real life… how these unsung heroes perform their jobs without asking for recognition of honour.

“Not Ready” is in the final stage of post-production and the founders of iFilmGroup Don Hickey and Matthew Marshall feel it is a fitting film to be coming out soon, given the hard work the people working in healthcare have done during the pandemic.

The most recent example of Nurses in iFilmGroup films is Matthew Marshall's newest film “Social Disobedience”. The film looks at a pandemic similar to the one we are in the middle of. It looks at how people react to being isolated. The film is being shot remotely from each actor’s home location. Reshma Rajan plays a nurse who is talking with a patient’s family over the phone about a family member that is ill and in the hospital. “I have been watching what has been going on during the pandemic and it opened the doors to how you can use characters in ways that are not the traditional ways,” says Marshall who is the writer and director of the film.

Marshall and Hickey do not rule out more films coming with a nurse or medical staff in them. They’re in the planning stages of the second ‘Ronny’ film which will be a follow-up to the original Ronny’s Bench. Could that mean a return of Jamie Rainbird’s character? Will he have escaped the Psychiatric Hospital again? What mischief might he get into?

That would mean more medical personal trying to track him down. When pressed for details the iFilmGroup team says “you will have to wait and see”. Marshall also hints that nurse roles may be in the back of his head for a film short. “It’s about how to work certain kinds of characters into a storyline that does not take place in a medical facility. If I can create that storyline, then I don’t rule it out,” Marshall says with a smile.

The team will continue to write stories that inspire them about the things in the community that move them. What comes next from the team is always something to look forward to, and is only limited by their imagination and the world around them.

iFilmGroup - Healthcare Workers in Film Promo - 2021