Ideas worth spreading

A tribute to nurses

1,515,243 views | Carolyn Jones • TEDMED 2016

Carolyn Jones spent five years interviewing, photographing and filming nurses across America, traveling to places dealing with some of the nation's biggest public health issues. She shares personal stories of unwavering dedication in this celebration of the everyday heroes who work at the front lines of health care.

Carolyn Jones spent five years interviewing, photographing and filming nurses across America, traveling to places dealing with some of the nation's biggest public health issues. She shares personal stories of unwavering dedication in this celebration of the everyday heroes who work at the front lines of health care.

This talk was presented at an official TED conference. TED's editors chose to feature it for you.

Watch Defining Hope on November 1st to see how nurses are transforming the culture of dying in America. With our rapidly aging population and incalculable challenges in healthcare and end-of-life care, we are not dying the way we used to. When faced with a life-threatening illness, nurses can guide us through very complex choices and help us figure out what makes life worth living.

Donate to the Defining Hope movement to bring nurse-led advance care planning to communities across the country.

About the speaker

Carolyn Jones

Photographic ethnographer

See speaker profile

Carolyn Jones creates projects that point our attention towards issues of global concern.

| Explore

The American Nurse Project

PBS News Hour, 2013 | Article

"Portraits of Compassion: Photographer Shows Voice, Fortitude of American Nurses"

| Watch

The American Nurse on "Katie"

"Katie," 2014

100 People Foundation | 2012 | Book

Everyday Heroes book excerpt

Oliver Sacks | Knopf, 2015 | Book

Gratitude

I have loved and been loved, he wrote. I have been given much and I have given something in return ... Above all, I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege and adventure.

Sherwin B. Nuland | Vintage, 1995 | Book

How We Die

The greatest dignity to be found in death is the dignity of the life that preceded it. This is a form of hope we can all achieve, and it is the most abiding of all. Hope resides in the meaning of what our lives have been.

Atul Gawande | Metropolitan Books, 2014 | Book

Being Mortal

Our ultimate goal, after all, is not a good death but a good life to the very end.

Paul Kalanithi | Random House, 2016 | Book

When Breath becomes Air

What makes life meaningful enough to go on living?

Victor Frankl | Beacon Press, 2006 | Book

Man’s Search for Meaning

Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way.

Jessica Zitter | Avery, 2017 | Book

Extreme Measures: Finding a Better Path to the End of Life

It makes no sense to scoop people out of the river when we could go upstream and prevent them from falling in in the first place. The ICU is not the place for these conversations to begin, and yet that is where they are often happening, if they do at all.

Michael Haneke | 2012 | Watch

Amour

Anne: I don't want to carry on. You're making such sweet efforts to make everything easier for me. But I don't want to go on. For my own sake, not yours.

Cesc Gay | 2015 | Watch

Truman

This remarkable film looks at choices made at the end of life, and how profoundly they impact those we love.

This talk was presented at an official TED conference. TED's editors chose to feature it for you.

Watch Defining Hope on November 1st to see how nurses are transforming the culture of dying in America. With our rapidly aging population and incalculable challenges in healthcare and end-of-life care, we are not dying the way we used to. When faced with a life-threatening illness, nurses can guide us through very complex choices and help us figure out what makes life worth living.

Donate to the Defining Hope movement to bring nurse-led advance care planning to communities across the country.