[Sandy Summers] said that "ER" routinely and inaccurately features doctors usurping jobs typically performed by nurses -- wielding a defibrillator to shock a patient's heart, holding bedside counseling sessions with families and sprinting into a parking lot to haul the latest victim into the emergency room. She said her group was particularly incensed after the lone major nurse character on "ER" - - Abby Lockhart, played by actress Maura Tierney -- recently decided to chuck her career in nursing to return to medical school. A few weeks earlier, an attending physician on the show summarily fired striking nurses, replacing them with inexperienced foreign-born practitioners willing to work for "minimum wage."

So far, Summers said, more than 100 nurses have peppered executives at NBC and "ER" with e-mails in an attempt to persuade producers to make changes that in Summers' view "would portray nurses and nursing in a more accurate light -- not as handmaidens to physicians."

To [Diana J. Mason], who last year urged in an editorial in her journal that nurses boycott "ER" to protest its depiction of nurses, the show's fictional nature is no excuse for what she regards as demeaning inaccuracies.