urses around the country have rallied together after two of the hosts of "The View" belittled one of their colleagues, a contestant in this year's Miss America pageant.

Nurses and readers here in Carbon County who took to social media to blast View hosts Joy Behar and Michelle Collins. While they're dumbfounded by the comments, local nurses say the episode may actually raise awareness for their jobs."I was shocked that professional educated women could be so ignorant and unversed in the role of a registered nurse," said Gabrielle Lozowsky, director of Blue Mountain Health's Acute Rehabilitation unit.A clip from the show that went viral earlier this week shows Behar and Collins cracking wise about 2015 Miss Colorado Kelley Johnson, who wore her nurse's scrubs and stethoscope out on stage during a preliminary round for this year's pageant. The registered nurse talked about how an early-stage dementia patient changed her perspective on being "just a nurse," for the talent portion of the pageant.Collins didn't feel Johnson's monologue was a suitable "talent" for the competition, while Behar was more focused on Johnson's "Doctor's stethoscope."Through the instantaneous world of social media, the backlash was swift. Hashtags like #nursesunite and #nursesmatter exploded in popularity.Times News readers were among the many sharing the messages."Bottom line is one day those women will need the skills of a nurse. And that day, there will be a nurse who remembers the insulting and disrespectful comments," Faith Richards wrote on the TN Facebook.Poster Carol McFarland called it the worst show on TV."They just enjoy themselves demeaning other people. Barbara Walters has really gotten senile if she thinks that is a good show now!" she wrote.Lozowsky said that the View hosts had espoused what is really an outdated view of what nurses do. Every day they are tasked with assessing a wide range of factors for multiple patients - often knowing more details about their patients' conditions than their doctors do."I think it was an archaic view of what a nurse's role is in our system. Nurses are more than just medicine distributors," she said.The hosts' attempts to clarify the comments didn't help them. Readers also said they were unimpressed with the apology."That was not an apology. They tried to make it everyone else's fault for 'misunderstanding the joke,'" Amanda Knappenberger said.Three days from when the comments first went viral, there is some hope that the episode could be a teaching moment. There has been a shortage of nurses nationwide for sometime.Johnson & Johnson took the comments seriously. The company announced on its Facebook page Thursday that its disagrees "with recent comments on daytime television about the nursing profession, and we have paused our advertising accordingly."The backlash to the View hosts' comments has helped shed a light on the many tasks that nurses do every day, that many people take for granted.Lozowsky said she hopes it will inspire young women to realize that even if they want to be a pageant queen, they can also have career goals like being a nurse."I hate to say it, but I think this whole scandal so to speak has really brought nursing profession into the limelight," she said."Hopefully some young girls will realize you can be a pretty intelligent, polished, goal-driven professional woman, and still be a Miss America."