Tag: Nurse

The Changing Landscape of Health Care Jobs in the United States

IMG_2285Attention all new nursing grads and other health care job-seekers: Today in the NYT there is a fascinating interactive feature “How the Recession Reshaped the Economy, in 255 Charts” by Alicia Parlapiano and Jeremy Ashkenas. It helps illustrate where the health care jobs are in our country, what the average salaries are within different sectors of the health care system, and what the trends are in terms of growth (or decline) of the different sectors.

Using data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the authors illustrate in easy-to-read charts how the number of jobs have changed for a particular industry over the past decade. These data are only available for private industries, so for health care, public health jobs are (unfortunately) not included. The only middle-wage private industries that did not lose jobs during the recession were those within health care.

One of the charts is titled The Medical Economy and here is what stands out to me:

  • Health care industries that were relatively unaffected by the recession and that have shown steady growth include home health care services, outpatient care centers (both general outpatient care and ones specific to mental health), and physician’s offices.
  • Health screening programs (including blood and organ banks) have recovered and grown.
  • Psychiatric and substance abuse hospitals have recovered and grown.
  • General medical-surgical hospitals remained relatively unaffected by the recession but appear to be mostly flat in terms of growth.
  • Specialty hospitals (excluding psychiatric and substance abuse) have recovered and grown, but they have shown a substantial decline in jobs since March 2012 (with a small blip back up over the past few months). I would imagine these changes for specialty care hospitals are correlated with the roll-out of ACA, especially changes to Medicare reimbursement for hospital care.

Take home lesson for people in the job-search mode within health care: Follow the money and look for jobs in the economically healthier parts of the U.S. health care system. Don’t rely on hospitals as the only places for job-searching.

Take home lesson for those of us in the role of nursing (or other health care professions) education: These ‘hard’ economic data provide even more good reasons to recruit and prepare students for work in primary care, community-based, non-acute care settings.

Dear Nursing Grads: Even More Reasons to Go Directly Into Community/Public Health Nursing

urbanleagueWay back in the not-so-groovy 1980s when I graduated from nursing school, all of my nursing instructors told me I would have to work in a hospital setting for several years before being able to work in community/public health, which is what drew me to nursing to begin with. Thankfully, I did not listen to them and went straight into my first nursing job as Hypertension Nurse Coordinator for the Richmond Health Department. This is a photo of me wearing my requisite navy blue public health nursing duds and shaking hands with then Virginia Governor Chuck Robb. I was in his office that day with the Richmond Urban League staff with whom I worked on community-based hypertension control projects in churches. I loved my first job as a public health nurse and I have continued to love all my subsequent community/public health nursing jobs since then. I would have made a miserable hospital nurse and most likely would have left nursing altogether if forced to work in a hospital. To be clear, I have nothing against hospital nurses (and indeed they have saved my life in the past!), but the community is where my passion lies.

Why are nursing instructors still telling nursing students that they have to work in a hospital setting upon graduation? Is it because this is what they were told and they don’t question it? Where in the world do they get this silly and completely outdated notion that hospital nursing experience is the only experience that makes for a ‘real nurse?’ Why would a nurse with hospital experience make for a better community/public health nurse? And why are we still educating nurses almost exclusively in acute care/tertiary care hospital settings?

In a 1961 New England Journal of Medicine article “The Ecology of Medical Care,” Kerr White wrote about how serious questions could be raised about medical and nursing students’ clinical experiences in academic medical center hospitals–giving them a limited and biased view of the health care needs of a community. “Medical, nursing, and other students of the health professions cannot fail to receive unrealistic impressions of medicine’s task in contemporary Western society” (as quoted in Thomas Bodenheimer and Kevin Grumbach’s Understanding Health Policy: A Clinical Approach, McGraw-Hill, 2012). Surely in ‘modern’ nursing education we could easily find more community-based clinical rotation sites in areas like pediatrics, OB/GYN, psych, and chronic disease and transition care. The 2010 Institute of Medicine’s Future of Nursing report admonished us to do that; four years later I see no concrete improvements in this area.

I’ve written about this topic before and refer you to the still relevant blog post from 2012, Dear Grads: Please Go Directly Into Community/Public Health Nursing. Along with the advice and links to resources I gave in this previous post, I add the following:

  • We need to make it easier (and preferable) for pre-nursing students to gain volunteer experience in outpatient and community settings and not simply send them to the closest hospital to be modern-day Candy Stripers. Here in Seattle some rewarding (based on student feedback) community-based health care volunteer opportunities are with the 45th Street Homeless Youth Clinic, Bailey-Boushay House (HIV AIDS and hospice care), and Needle Exchange programs.
  • Nursing students can add to their community/public health toolkit (and hence, boost their employment opportunities) by seeking out extra trainings in community/public health-related topics. For instance, the Institute for Healthcare Improvement’s Open School Professional online course “Introduction to Population Health” is an excellent resource (and is free when your school is a member). Another great (local) resource I use in my teaching is the free online certificate trainings offered through the University of Washington’s Northwest Center for Public Health Practice.
  • In addition, I highly recommend that nursing students (and all nurses) attend an Undoing Institutional Racism workshop by the People’s Institute Northwest. The People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond is a national program with headquarters in New Orleans. If you don’t live in the Seattle area check out their website for links to upcoming trainings in your area. Our school uses their Undoing Racism workshop as a required diversity course since it is so powerful and professionally done.
  • Learn another language if you don’t already know one! Take a medical Spanish course. Participate in a travel immersion course or experience, especially if it focuses on some aspect of community health or social well-being.
  • Go straight into community/public health nursing if that is where your heart is!

The Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine

IMG_0678In case you haven’t run across this journal before, I encourage you to check out The Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine. It was created by some of the students in  the Narrative Medicine Master’s Program at Columbia University. They state, “…we seek an ongoing mode of self-expression as a group, to continue outside the classroom that which was created within. With that in mind we call ourselves and our efforts The Intima, resonating on the concept that Narrative Medicine defines itself as the intimate interface between two people, one as healer, one as being healed, yet both yielding and both gaining from the experience. (…) The Intima is an electronic journal dedicated to promoting the theory and practice of Narrative Medicine, an interdisciplinary field aiming to enhance health care through the development of effective communication and understanding between caregivers and their patients. By providing an online venue for the expression of personal experience within the medical arena, The Intima creates space for caregivers, professionals, patients, and families to share their narratives in a format that fosters empathy, reflection, and deeper understanding of the diversity inherent in effective delivery of care.”
In their Spring 2014 edition under Fiction, I have an essay “Steps to Footcare” about my work as a faculty preceptor with the University of Washington’s Teeth and Toes Clinics, where we provide basic foot and dental care to Seattle’s homeless population. This particular essay takes as its form the actual list of instructions we give students to follow when providing care. I fictionalized it by creating a composite female character based on several ‘real’ patients.

New Zealand Postcards: Cultural Safety: A Wee Way To Go

DSC01879 - Version 2DSC01418This week I had the good fortune of meeting with Denise Wilson, RN, PhD, a Maori New Zealand nurse and Director of the Taupua Waiora Centre for Māori Health Research at AUT School of Public Health and Psychosocial Studies here in Auckland. She talked about her work with cultural safety in New Zealand.

Like many indigenous peoples across the world–including our own in North America–Maori cultural conceptions of health and well-being tend to be much more holistic and less individualistic than mainstream Western ones. As Ms. Wilson explained, for most Maori patients she has worked with (clinically and in research), spirituality and connection with their land and extended family are the most important aspects of health. The Maori word for land, Whenua, also means placenta: it is what nourishes you. The history of colonialization, and being displaced from ancestral lands, have had profound negative effects on Maori health and well-being.

The term ‘cultural safety’ came from a Maori nursing student, Iriphapeti Ramsden (1946-2003), who in the early 1980’s stood up in class one day and asked something like, “We talk about patient safety, physical safety, and ethical safety, but what about cultural safety?” She was specifically referring to the difficulties Maori patients and their families (as well as Maori nursing students such as herslef) have within the Eurocentric health care system in New Zealand. These difficulties continue to contribute to New Zealand’s large health inequities and low representation of Maori nurses and other health care providers in the healthcare system. Ramsden went on to receive her PhD, developing the concept and practice of cultural safety. I discovered that Dr. Ramsden was part of the New Zealand feminist Spiral Collective, which ‘self-published’ Maori writer Keri Hulme’s book The Bone People after it was rejected by all major publishers. The Bone People, of course, went on to win the Man Booker Prize. One of my all-time favorite books, I assigned it as our New Zealand study abroad Common Book this quarter.

According to Denise, a culturally unsafe practice is “anything that diminishes, demeans, or disempowers the cultural identity and well-being of an individual.” A culturally safe or unsafe practice is determined by the patient and the patient’s family (another form of what we term in the U.S. ‘patient-centered care.’) Denise told me that a good ‘cultural safety’ question nurses can ask patients (and their family members) is, “What are things that are really important to you that we need to consider in your care?” Cultural safety includes an emphasis on self-reflection (and action) by the nurse in terms of understanding his or her own cultural and social attitudes that affect their care of patients and communities.

Cultural safety has been taught in New Zealand nursing programs for over twenty years. Since 1992 it has been a requirement for nursing and midwifery registration examinations. What started off as a bicultural focus (Maroi and Pakeha/non-Maori), has been expanded to include things like migrant status, gender/sexual orientation, socio-economic ‘class’ status, and disability. The concept of cultural safety has been adopted by regions in Australia, Canada, and the United States. Denise acknowledged the significant advances that have been made in New Zealand in terms of cultural safety, but she concluded with: “We do have a wee way to go.”

Cultural safety seems to have much in common with my favorite U.S. ‘cultural’ concept of cultural humility, which I have written about in a previous post. Cultural humility was developed as a concept by the African-American physician-nurse duo Tervalon and Murray-Garcia in their 1998 article, “Cultural humility versus cultural competence: a critical distinction in defining physician training outcomes in multicultural education.” (Journal of the Poor and Underserved, 9(2) 117-125.) Since then, both the practice and concept of cultural humility have been further refined. Cultural humility emphasizes: 1) a commitment to lifelong learning and critical self-reflection, 2) recognizing and changing power imbalances, and 3) developing institutional accountability. Take a look at the excellent 30-minute video Cultural Humility: People, Principles and Practices by San Fransisco State professor Vivian Chavez.

Even closer to (my) home of Seattle, the historical roots and “remnants of our unresolved past” of racism and classism are powerfully presented in Shaun Scott’s short documentary A Really Nice Place to Live. In the film, Shaun Scott points out that Seattle is a byproduct of White Western Frontierism. He references historian Richard Drinnon’s work on the ‘Metaphysics of Indian-Hating,” where Drinnon asserts that all of American’s domestic and international race and class dynamics can be traced back to our original interactions with our ‘own’ Indigenous peoples.

We all have a wee way to go in terms of addressing and redressing the effects of racism and classism and all the other ‘isms’ of the world.

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The first photograph here is of the friendly and informative staff at the Alliance Health booth at Auckland’s annual Pasifika Festival, which I attended this past weekend. The staff members were promoting community awareness and prevention of rheumatic heart disease. New Zealand has the highest prevalence of rheumatic heart disease of all industrialized countries, and the highest rates are among Maori. It is a result of untreated ‘strep throat’ and is considered a disease of poverty. One of their community-led ‘interventions’ was the creation of Mama’s House as a culturally-appropriate way to engage the Pasifika community.  “Knowing that mothers, sisters and aunties are the first port of call about all matters relating to family health and well-being. After all, ‘Mama knows best’.” It also happened to be International Women’s Day. (And I also had just played ‘Mama-Nurse’ for some of my students who had developed penicillin- resistant strep throat, resulting in some ‘interesting’ interactions with the New Zealand healthcare system, which–like our own–has ‘a wee way to go.’)

The second photo is an interactive game show called “The Survivors,” part of the Maroi section of Wellington’s excellent Te Papa Museum exhibition Slice of Heaven: New Zealand’s Twentieth Century History. As this photo shows, one of the decisions you have to make while playing the game is whether you (as a Maori young woman in the 1970’s) went to the shorter/cheaper nurse aid program or to the longer/more expensive (and heavily Pakeha/’White European’) program to become a Registered Nurse. Guess which choice led to better outcomes, including lifespan for this woman?

Green Beyond Death

indexThis is a shout-out to the work of a former nursing student of mine, Hunter Marshall. He is now a hospice nurse, as well as an environmental and death with dignity advocate, community activist–and a  talented writer! Check out his recent article “Dying to give back to the earth” in Waging Nonviolence (3-3-14).

Hunter told me that he is actively pursuing writing as a mechanism for continuing his patient/policy advocacy: “I particularly enjoy using narratives about individuals that intersect with larger policy issues.” Another rebellious nurse (and writer) in the younger generation warms the cockles of my older nurse/writer heart!

New Zealand Postcards: Misogyny In Sheep’s Clothing (with a G-String)

DSC01009I preface this by saying: I know the Biblical quote that it’s easier to see the speck in another person’s eye than to see the plank in your own. In the U.S. we have a lot of work to do in terms of overcoming misogyny in all its ugly forms (including commercial sex trade/exploitation or perhaps even all the books by Philip Roth?) We have a very large plank, especially in places like Nevada.

But I have to say that one of the most surprising things I’ve learned while in New Zealand these past months is the country’s level of violence against women. Before coming here I mainly knew that New Zealand was rightly proud of the fact that it was the first country in the world to give women the right to vote (in 1893). I also knew that there was a healthy cadre of New Zealand feminists at work influencing national policy through research, direct service, and the arts. What I had not realized was how deeply ingrained the sexism is here, perhaps as yet another direct descendant of British colonialism? That is what one of my Maori female informants and experts on this topic asked somewhat rhetorically in answer to my question to her about this topic. I had not realized that prostitution is legal in New Zealand (the photo here is of the Calendar Girls strip club/’gentleman’s club/brothel left standing in the Red Zone of Christchurch.) I had not realized that New Zealand is one of the worst industrialized countries in terms of violence against women. (See: Facts on Violence Against Women, by Janet Fanslow, New Zealand Herald, 11-25-11.)  Of course, those issues are all interrelated.

A society’s level of sexism and misogyny, plus tolerance of violence, plus racism, plus poverty, plus sexualization of girls, plus a high level of commoditization and commercialism, are all documented risk factors for commercial sexual exploitation (CSE) of girls and women. Additional environmental risk factors for CSE include: open presence of the adult sex industry, transient male populations, and proximity to borders/ports.

I have spent many decades as a nurse working with homeless and prostituted teens and young adults on both coasts of the U.S., as well as in Thailand. There was a time during the early part of the HIV/AIDS epidemic when I bought the idea of sex trade as potentially being empowering work for women, along the idea that legalizing and regulating (including health screens) prostitution/sex work were all good things. But that belief was short-lived when I realized how dangerous the work is, no matter how ‘upscale’ or regulated or sanitized. And when I realized (from both credible research reports and stories from young women I worked with) that the women and children in prostitution anywhere in the world come from the most marginalized and oppressed groups in society. And how many (upwards of 90% in many studies) have untreated PTSD and histories of sexual abuse as children. And there is mounting evidence that legalizing prostitution only increases human/sex trafficking.

Efforts like those in my home state of Washington to decriminalize prostitution for the women/men/girls/trans in sex work (and refer them to appropriate services), while simultaneously stepping up the severity of prosecution of the buyers (‘Johns’) and the traders (‘Pimps’), make the most sense to me. Meanwhile, Nevada has counties near places like Las Vegas where prostitution is not only legal. They lock women inside barbed-wire secured brothels called ‘ranches,’ and then busloads of ‘customers’ arrive to be serviced. Like I said, we have planks in our own eyes.

Nurses and other front-line primary care providers need education and training in how to identify and effectively work with children and adults involved in CSE. Similar to gaining skills in working with victims of intimate partner violence, any screening or intervention is based on building rapport, maintaining appropriate professional boundaries (including not ‘rushing in to the rescue’), understanding PTSD and trauma bonding, using the principles of harm reduction to help the client build a safety plan, and knowing good community resources for appropriate referrals. One important health component I’ve found to be essential is having culturally-clued in positive body work (like yoga) to refer people to. It helps them get cued in to what the body can do, instead of what is done to the body (body as object). And for anyone who doesn’t know how to ask a patient about this topic, here’s the standard screening question: “Have you ever traded sex for money or other things needed to survive?”

And remember the words of Gloria Steinem: “Prostitution isn’t the world’s oldest profession. It’s the oldest oppression.”

Resources:

Polaris Project: For a World Without Slavery

The Washington Anti-Trafficking Response Network: 206-245-0782

National Center for Missing and Exploited Children: 1-800-THE-LOST

National Human Trafficking Resource Center Hotline: 1-888-373-7888

An excellent 5-minute training/education video about the process of ‘grooming’ that can draw young women into prostitution: GEMS The Making of Girl.

New Zealand Postcards/ Disaster Preparedness: Lions and Tigers and Zombies and Earthquakes, Oh My!

DSC01509There are many things to worry about in this world. For instance, right now in my hometown of Seattle, the Alaskan Way Viaduct is sagging a bit due to the large-scale drilling going on in the downtown area. The Alaskan Way Viaduct is built on ‘reclaimed land’ from Puget Sound that would most likely turn to liquefaction in our next earthquake (similar to what happened in the Christchurch earthquakes). But OK—state officials say it’s nothing to worry about.

As I write this post I am sitting on a ‘somewhat active’ series of volcanoes, on land that was covered in a hot mud eruption only ten years ago. Rotorua, on the North Island of New Zealand is a hot mess. The youth hostel we are staying in has fire action directions in each bedroom, but no information about what to do in case of an earthquake–or a volcanic eruption.

Disaster preparedness and effective disaster messaging are important components of public health. In the U.S., disaster preparedness communications specialists came up with the  Zombie Disaster Preparedness Campaign. Supposedly this campaign started out as a joke by a CDC communications specialist frustrated over the lack of public interest in their traditional disaster preparation information. But then the Zombie Campaign became so effective they’ve continued to use and expand upon it. This shows that with the ‘Chicken Little’ dire warnings of impending doom, a little levity can help.

Last week in Wellington, we talked with Sara McBride, a PhD candidate at Massey University at the Joint Center for Disaster Research. (The photo here is of the inside of their Emergency Operations Center where they coordinate disaster response for the university and conduct trainings). Her area of expertise is as a risk communicator, work which she was doing in Christchurch before the earthquakes. She told us that disaster communication is tricky because too much emphasis on doom and gloom results in people becoming fatalistic. Ms. McBride is currently doing research and work on earthquake/disaster preparedness and messaging in Washington State (where she grew up). As Professor Timothy Melbourne writes in his guest editorial in today’s Seattle Times, the Seattle area is at high risk for major earthquakes and tsunamis on the scale of those in Japan three years ago (“What Our Region Has Not Learned from the Japan Earthquake and Tsunami, 2-25-14). He points out that Washington State needs an honest and transparent assessment of building safety (and other structures such as our dams and bridges). This is an excellent ‘health in all policies’ topic for nurses to get involved with.

New Zealand Postcards: The Greening of Hospitals

1981Sustainable health care has the triple aim of maximizing benefits (and minimizing or mitigating costs) in environmental, economic, and social realms.

According to a 2012 Commonwealth Fund study “Can Sustainable Hospitals Bend the Health Care Cost Curve?” (S. Kaplan, et al.), U.S. health systems (especially hospitals) leave costly environmental footprints. In this report, the authors cite estimates that U.S. hospitals use 836 trillion British thermal units of energy and spend over $10 billion on energy annually–resulting in 8% of all U.S. greenhouse gas emissions and 7% of our total carbon dioxide emissions. Hospitals also generate 6,600 tons of waste every day (resulting in more energy consumption, as well as methane gas production) and utilize large quantities of toxic chemicals. They identified model ‘greening the hospitals’ initiatives across the U.S from the Healthier Hospitals Initiative and Health Care Without Harm’s Practice Greenhealth program. Based on the costs/benefits of these model hospital programs, the Commonwealth Fund researchers estimate that such interventions could result in health care savings in excess of $5.4 billion over five years. Good for the economy and good for Mother Earth and good (health promoting) for patients, staff, and the community.

Debbie Wilson, a New Zealand nurse, doctoral candidate, and Sustainability Officer with the Manukau Health District in Auckland, tells the story of how she and a few other environmentally-conscious nurse colleagues  “rugby tackled the hospital CEO” in the hallway one day to present their concerns to him. “He rather liked it because he’s Welsh.” I assume she is referring to the rugby tackle health policy/advocacy approach and not to any inherent Welsh environmental enlightenment. But their rugby tackle worked and they now have a robust sustainability program underway. They began by working to raise awareness of the issues with hospital and clinic staff, which included measuring their baseline environmental footprint: (measurement + transparency= awareness). They’ve set their goal of a 20% footprint reduction by 2017 and are now in the process of writing a systems-wide sustainability policy. Nurses and health policy/health in all policies and advocacy at work!

I met Debbie Wilson last week at the University of Otago’s public health summer school where she was one of the key presenters. In talking with her afterwards, she told me about the model greening of hospitals initiative at Seattle Children’s Hospital. I admit that I didn’t know much about this model program that is quite literally in my own backyard.

Seattle Children’s Clean, Green Initiative was launched in 2007 and has already won Environmental Excellence national awards. Of note among their multiple and comprehensive greening the hospital programs are: 1) switching to environmentally (and health) friendly cleaning products; 2) providing monetary incentives for staff members to walk/bike/bus it to work; 3) piloting a switch to organic cotton hospital linens (including lab coats); and, 4) reducing food waste/increasing composting and recycling in their hospital kitchen (as well as increasing use of fresh, locally-sourced fruits and vegetables).

Radical Hat-Burning Nurses Unite!

IMG_1082Radical nurses are back, or perhaps they never left and are just becoming more visible, more organized. The photo here is of my nurse’s cap-wearing trained seal mascot given to me by a friend in nursing school–who promptly dropped out of school because she was too radical for them.

There is the Radical Nurse on Facebook (aka Rebekah Dubrosky, RN) who says of herself, “Radical nurse goes to graduate school with hopes of starting a nursing revolution!” Her profile photo is of the formidable radical nurse and mother of public health nursing, Lillian Wald. Ms. Dubrosky is a doctoral student in the College of Nursing at the University of Wisconsin/Milwaukee. She just published a very good article “Iris Young’s Five Faces of Oppression Applied to Nursing” (Nursing Forum vol 48(3):205-210, July/Sept 2013).

There is the newly-formed Rebellious Nursing! group, which had its first national conference this past fall in Philadelphia. They state: “We believe that Nursing is an inherently political profession and that all nurses are rebellious.” I’m not sure I agree with their tag line, but I do love their logo of a white nurse’s cap going up in flames. An extension of the bra-burning second wave feminists and the corset-burning first-wave feminists. The third-wave feminists seem to have nothing left to burn so they’re putting the push-up bras and corsets back on. (Just kidding. Don’t burn me all you wonderful third-wave feminists–including my former nursing student who introduced me to Rebellious Nursing!).

Going back to the second-wave feminists, there was Casandra: Radical Feminist Nurses Network from the 1980’s. Some of their old newsletters are on Peggy Chinn’s blog, NurseManifest. Peggy Chinn, RN, PhD, is Professor Emerita, University of Connecticut, but she will never truly retire.

There were also Radical Nurse Groups (RNGs) active in the 1980’s within the UK. A nurse blogger who goes by the pseudonym Grumbling Appendix (gotta love British humor) and who works in an NHS hospital (hence the need for a pseudonym), is now archiving material for the RNG’s. In the recent post in the New Left forum, Grumbling Appendix makes the observation that some things have not changed much. I love the Radical Nurses Archive: So….Just How Radical Are You? It includes a funny-sad multiple-choice test from 1982 (when I graduated from wretched nursing school wearing a wretched nurse’s cap), although I need a Brit to help interpret the final scoring scheme.

For an amazing blast from the past that is also sobering in terms of how little things have changed, take a look at the 20 minute film The Politics of Caring from 1977 (produced, directed, and edited by Joan Finck and Timothy Sawyer in collaboration with Karen Wolf, RN.) It is posted on Peggy Chinn’s NurseManifest blog. The only difference between then and now that I see is that the nurses then were still wearing white nurse’s caps (non-flaming) and white dress uniforms (and oh my! those disgusting thick white opaque pantyhose that kept the oh my! pubic hairs from dropping off onto the operating room floor!) There’s something about ‘radical’ and the use of exclamation points….

In the film they begin by saying that while nurses are the largest component of the healthcare workforce they have the least say in health policy. Familiar? They discuss the disconnect between what is taught in nursing school about providing quality of care, and the reality of what is possible within the practice environment. (I hear this from my students all the time). They also question whether nursing can even be called a profession when the majority of nurses don’t have control over their work environments. And they discuss the tensions within nursing with the then newly-emerging role of advance practice nurses/nurse practitioners, pointing out (somewhat rightly so) that these ‘new nurses’ were mainly working within the medical model of care.

As a community health nurse I was fascinated to hear the nurses in the film talk about “the mecca of community nursing” as a place where nurses could practice ‘real nursing’ focusing on health prevention and promotion within the nursing model of care. Community health is what attracted me to nursing in the first place and it continues to be what I love most about my work. But we need hospital nurses and there are nurses who love working in hospitals and don’t want to have to ‘trade up’ to community health, or to become a nurse practitioner or a nursing professor in order to have greater control over their working conditions. Besides unions and Radical Nursing! groups, what is there for them?

Notes on (Men in) Nursing

Cover of "Notes on Nursing"
Cover of Notes on Nursing

In the Preface of Notes on Nursing, Florence Nightingale wrote, “…every woman is a nurse.” That men were—or could be—nurses was not within Nightingale’s Victorian worldview. Men were doctors (husbands) and women were nurses (wives and mothers). A re-read of her book revealed to me one place in which she hints at the fact that men could be useful as nurses. It comes mid-way through her chapter “Noise”:

“A man is now a more handy and far less objectionable being in a sick room than a woman. Compelled by her dress, every woman now either shuffles or waddles—only a man can cross the floor of a sick-room without shaking it!”

She goes on to condemn the wearing of rustling silk and crinoline and the creaking of stays and shoes. Presumably she advocated simple (and quiet) cotton dresses for nurses.

As I wrote in my previous blog post “More than a few more men needed in nursing” (12-15-10), nursing continues to be the least gender balanced of any of the health professions. The traditionally male-dominated medical profession has achieved almost perfect gender balance. The other traditionally female-dominated profession of social work now has at least 20% men, while nursing continues to have a paltry  7% men in the workforce.

Until this week I considered myself an enlightened female nurse on the issue of gender diversity in nursing. But then I started looking at the required readings—especially the ones from nursing textbooks—that I had assigned for my community health course. I realized how un-gender neutral they are. All of the contemporary community/public health nurses who are quoted or included in photographs in the chapters are female. An otherwise well-written chapter on the history of public health nursing in the U.S. only mentions female nurses and uses terms like “our sister nurses” and “our foremothers.” Where are our brother nurses and our forefathers?

Important facts I learned this week from reading up on the topic of men in nursing include:

  • Men in nursing have a long and venerable history that is not acknowledged or taught very well in nursing schools. The history includes monastic orders dating back to the fourth and fifth centuries.
  • In the U.S. beginning after the Civil War men were actively shut out of nursing. For instance, the U.S. Army Nurse Corps banned men until 1955. When men were allowed to be nurses they were mainly confined to psychiatric nursing, which was considered dangerous and undesirable work for female nurses.
  • The commonly held perception (and resentment) among female nurses that men in nursing disproportionately get promoted and hold higher-paying administrative positions over their female counterparts does have merit. Economists call this phenomenon the “glass elevator,” and it applies to men in all female-dominated occupations (pink-collar jobs). However, within nursing this could also be partially explained by the fact that most men enter nursing at an older age and after time in another career versus their female counterparts. (see NYT ” More Men Enter Fields Dominated by Women” by Dewan and Gebeloff/5-20-12 and “More Men Trading Overalls for Nursing Scrubs” by Vigeland/3-21-12).
  • The Institute of Medicine’s Future of Nursing report specifically identifies improvement in gender diversity as a necessity for nursing. Running a profession on only half of the population (gender-wise) is unwise and untenable.

My conclusion: Nursing needs the best and the brightest no matter what their chromosomal make-up happens to be. We need more men in nursing. We need better nursing textbooks….