FORGET A Country Practice or ER, the best hospital dramas to hit the screen this week featured Coffs Coast nurses and a cast of local actors.

Two films made by Coffs Harbour Health Campus nurse educator Carolyn Guichard claimed the honours at the NSW Nurses' Association Short Film Festival.

Her award-winning films this year were Malleus Maleficarum, depicting the dark days of health and medicine shot in the Orara Valley, and a documentary on the Nurses and Midwives Rally in Sydney last year.

It was a major coup for Ms Guichard, a passionate filmmaker who last year won a third prize for her film The Gift, about a young couple and the birth of their first child.

“Malleus Maleficarum is a five-minute historical silent movie based on the Malleus, written by the Dominican Monks in 1486,” Ms Guichard said.

“It was used as a judicial case book for over 300 years to detect, persecute and legally murder healers and midwives.”

Ms Guichard's silent movie profiles a healer and midwife whose village and husband turn against her during the “burning times”.

The other movie, Nurses Strike Train, is a five-minute musical documentary on an historic event in Australian nursing history.

“That's where 4000 nurses and midwives met at Sydney's Olympic Park in 2010 to fight for nurse-patient ratios and safer patient care,” she said.

“Through advocacy, solidarity and courage, nurses and midwives realised their power by successfully negotiating nurse-to-patient ratios with NSW Health in February.”