Announcing its fifth annual Golden Lamp Awards, the Center for Nursing Advocacy highlighted the best and worst media portrayals of nurses in 2007. Here are some highlights.

Worst portrayals

* "Grey's Anatomy" consistently showed physicians giving all significant health care while nurses are peripheral subordinates.

* "Private Practice," a new television drama featuring wide-eyed midwifery student Dell Parker, described as perhaps the least knowledgeable major nurse character in recent prime-time history.

* Kelly Ripa. In a broadcast of "LIVE with Regis and Kelly," Ripa suggested that she would act as an erotic "sponge bath nurse" to help cohost Regis Philbin recover from open-heart surgery.

Best portrayals

* John Blanton, "There and Back Again." Formerly an editor for The Wall Street Journal, Blanton resigned from the paper and became a nurse in a post-9/11 search for meaning. His article focuses on the crushing workload and fear of error he experienced as a new burn unit nurse.

* Rachel Gotbaum, "Nursing a Shortage: Inside Out." Broadcast on National Public Radio, this documentary examined the causes and effects of the nursing shortage, as well as possible solutions.

The Center gave an honorable mention to the television drama "ER," described as the only drama to make a real effort to show what nurses do.

To see all the 2007 Golden Lamp Awards, go to http://www.nursingadvocacy.org.