DiversityNursing Blog

Written by David McNamee

Male registered nurses are earning more than female registered nurses across settings, specialties and positions, and this pay gap has not narrowed over time, says a new analysis of salary trends published in JAMA.

Although the salary gap between men and women has narrowed in many occupations since the introduction of the Equal Pay Act 50 years ago, say the study authors, pay inequality persists in medicine and nursing.

Previous studies have found that male registered nurses (RNs) have higher salaries than female registered RNs. In their new study, researchers from the University of California, San Francisco, sought to investigate what employment factors could explain these salary differences using recent data.

The researchers analyzed nationally representative data from the last six quadrennial National Sample Survey of Registered Nurses studies (1988-2008; including 87,903 RNs) and data from the American Community Survey (2001-13; including 205,825 RNs). In both studies, the proportion of men in the sample was 7%.

During every year, both of the studies demonstrated that salaries for male RNs were higher than the salaries of female RNs. What is more, the researchers found no significant changes in this pay gap - which averaged as an overall adjusted earnings difference of $5,148 - over the study period.

In ambulatory care the salary gap was $7,678 and in hospital settings it was $3,873. The smallest pay gap was found in chronic care ($3,792) and the largest was in cardiology ($6,034). The only specialty in which no significant pay gap between men and women RNs was detected was orthopedics. The salary difference was also found to extend across the range of positions, including roles such as middle management and nurse anesthetists.

Employers and physicians 'need to examine pay structures'

"The roles of RNs are expanding with implementation of the Affordable Care Act and emphasis on team-based care delivery," the authors write. 

They conclude:

"A salary gap by gender is especially important in nursing because this profession is the largest in health care and is predominantly female, affecting approximately 2.5 million women. These results may motivate nurse employers, including physicians, to examine their pay structures and act to eliminate inequities."

The results of a 2010 survey looking at the impact of the economic crisis on nursing salaries published in Nursing Management found that a nurse leader's average salary fell by $4,000 between 2007 and 2010. In the same survey, almost 60% of nurse leaders felt that they were not receiving appropriate compensation for their level of organizational responsibility.

However, that survey found no evidence that workload for nurse leaders had increased. The respondents reported that they were still working the same number of hours per week as they had traditionally and were not responsible for more staff members than before the economic crisis.

"If you thought nursing was immune to the downturn, think again. The poor economy is keeping us working longer than we'd anticipated," said Nursing Management editor-in-chief Richard Hader, "and in addition to wage cuts, organizations are freezing or eliminating retirement benefits, further negatively impacting employee morale."

Source: www.medicalnewstoday.com

By DIONNE SEARCEY, EDUARDO PORTER and ROBERT GEBELOFF

For Tabitha Waugh, it was another typical day of chaos on the sixth-floor cancer ward.

The fire alarm was blaring for the second time that afternoon, prompting patients to stumble out of their rooms. One confused elderly man approached Ms. Waugh, a registered nurse at St. Mary’s Medical Center here, but she had no time to console him. An aide was shouting from another room, where a patient sat dazed on the edge of his bed, blood pooling on the floor from the IV he had yanked from his vein.

“Hey, big guy, can you lay back in bed?” she asked, as she cleaned the patient before inserting a new line. He winced. “Hold my hand, O.K.?” she said.

Ms. Waugh, who is 30 and the main breadwinner in her family of four, still had three hours to go before the end of a 12-hour shift. But despite the stresses and constant demands, all the hard work was paying off.

Her wage of nearly $27 an hour provides for a comfortable life that includes a three-bedroom home, a pickup truck and a new sport utility vehicle, tumbling classes for her 3-year-old, Piper, and dozens of brightly colored Thomas the Tank Engine cars heaped under the double bed of her 6-year-old, Collin.

The daughter of a teacher’s aide and a gas station manager, Ms. Waugh, like many other hard-working and often overlooked Americans, has secured a spot in a profoundly transformed middle class. While the group continues to include large numbers of people sitting at desks, far fewer middle-income workers of the 21st century are donning overalls. Instead, reflecting the biggest change in recent years, millions more are in scrubs.

“We used to think about the men going out with their lunch bucket to their factory, and those were good jobs,” said Jane Waldfogel, a professor at Columbia University who studies work and family issues. “What’s the corresponding job today? It’s in the health care sector.”

In 1980, 1.4 million jobs in health care paid a middle-class wage: $40,000 to $80,000 a year in today’s money. Now, the figure is 4.5 million.

The pay of registered nurses — now the third-largest middle-income occupation and one that continues to be overwhelmingly female — has risen strongly along with the increasing demands of the job. The median salary of $61,000 a year in 2012 was 55 percent greater, adjusted for inflation, than it was three decades earlier.

And it was about $9,000 more than the shriveled wages of, say, a phone company repairman, who would have been more likely to head a middle-class family in the 1980s. Back then, more than a quarter of middle-income jobs were in manufacturing, a sector long dominated by men. Today, it is just 13 percent.

As the job market has shifted, women, in general, have more skillfully negotiated the twists and turns of the new economy, rushing to secure jobs in health care and other industries that demand more education and training. Men, by contrast, have been less successful at keeping up.

In many working- and middle-class households, women now earn the bigger paycheck, work longer hours and have greater opportunities for career advancement. As a result, millions of American families are being reconfigured along with the economy.

“The culture still has traditional attitudes about who does what, who brings home the bacon and who scrambles the eggs,” said Isabel Sawhill, co-director of the Center on Children and Families at the Brookings Institution. “The economy is now out of sync with the culture, and I think that’s creating tensions within marriage.”

A New Springboard

At the Waughs’ house, it is T.J. Waugh, 33, who picks up the couple’s two children from the babysitter when he leaves his afternoon shift at a small plant in Huntington.

By the time Ms. Waugh arrives home in rural Salt Rock from her shift, often far later than her 7 p.m. quitting time, the children have been bathed and fed.

The house is usually messy. The bathroom walls are covered with scribbles from bath crayons; dirty clothes pile up. Ms. Waugh often jams six 12-hour shifts into one week, leaving little time for cleaning and laundry. Mr. Waugh mows the lawn and will run the vacuum cleaner now and then, and if there are no clean towels, Ms. Waugh will do a load of laundry. Otherwise, housework waits until she has a stretch of days off.

“I’m just really tired when I get home,” Ms. Waugh said.

Ms. Waugh is the keeper of the family’s books. That she out-earns her husband — a pipe fitter who hunts deer and plays men’s softball on the weekends — is an unspoken given.

“She doesn’t rub that in,” he said.

Without missing a beat, Ms. Waugh adds, “It doesn’t matter where it comes from.”

Most of the new jobs produced by America’s sprawling economy — especially since the turn of the century — are either in highly paid occupations that often require an advanced degree, or, more predominantly, in lower-paid positions providing direct services that cannot be sent overseas and, at least for now, are difficult to automate.

But even with a hollowing out of the job market and a broad stagnation in wages, an analysis by The New York Times has found, a set of occupations has emerged that holds promise as the base of a more robust middle class.

Many are in health care, which has grown sharply over the last few decades.

Economists at the Labor Department project that by 2022, as baby boomers age, health care and social assistance will absorb nearly 20 percent of consumer spending, double the share of manufactured goods. The sector is expected to support over 21 million jobs, five million more than today. This includes half a million more registered nurses.

A Rare Green Shoot

The reordering of the economic landscape can be seen all over West Virginia’s old coal country, where billboards along the highways that run through the region advertise a new cardiac center and an orthopedic clinic; and where a strip mall houses Scrubs Unlimited, a medical outfitter, its retail floor crammed with nursing uniforms in 38 colors and Peter Pan prints.

Hugging the Ohio River as it bends around the Appalachian foothills, Cabell County, which includes Huntington, has often found itself on the wrong side of economic change. The population — about 97,000 today — has shrunk 10 percent over the last three decades, as the old have died and many of the young have left.

The railroad that helps shuttle coal to Huntington, one of the nation’s busiest inland ports, is still a source of jobs. But manufacturing employment — once clustered at the long-gone glassmaking plants and furniture makers — has dwindled to fewer than 5,000 jobs. Recently, a 1920s-era nickel alloy plant laid off dozens of workers after a bankruptcy, a corporate acquisition and weak sales.

In real terms, wages in Cabell County now are lower than in the 1970s, stumbling along well below the national average. One in five residents lives in poverty.

The health care industry — which added 3,000 jobs here over the last 10 years — is one of the few green shoots in a struggling economy.

West Virginia has been battered by the same forces that have reshaped the nation since the late 1970s, when global competition, an overvalued dollar, declining unions and advanced technology began to undercut the jobs created during America’s industrial heyday, deepening income inequality. And since 2000, the share of middle-income workers has been squeezed and wages have stagnated.

Yet many of the jobs added in medical services here and across the nation have turned out to be surprisingly good ones.

That was what motivated the only male registered nurse colleague of Ms. Waugh’s on the sixth-floor cancer unit, Johnny Dial, a former highway construction worker and heavy equipment mechanic. More men are joining nursing, but they still make up only 10 percent of the ranks, compared with 4 percent in 1980.

As Mr. Dial contemplated supporting a family, it came down to health care or the railroad if he wanted job security and benefits. He chose what he thought would be a more fulfilling career, and the same one as his wife, who is also a nurse.

“You get to help people,” Mr. Dial said.

Women Stepped Up

Similar thinking was behind the career choices of Ms. Waugh’s fellow female R.N.s. They include a former waitress, a former journalist, an ex-administrator in a metals factory and a former store clerk at Bath & Body Works. In addition to the satisfaction of the work, they all said, the wages are generally better in health care than they could find in other fields.

Ms. Waugh has urged her husband to try to move up at his company, where he earns about $40,000 in regular wages, plus pay for occasional extra shifts, or to switch to a more lucrative career, maybe even in health care as a radiology technician.

But for Mr. Waugh, the only way up at the plant is to go into sales, a promotion he already turned down because he said he did not want to “deal with people.” He could earn more in the coal mines, but that work is dirty and dangerous.

Mr. Waugh has talked about trying college again; he dropped out twice in the past. At one point, his wife even filled out application papers for him to jump-start his re-enrollment, but he did not pursue class work.

“My philosophy is he is lazy,” Ms. Waugh said, standing in the hospital’s white hallway. “That’s what makes me so mad.”

For all the troubles associated with traditionally male jobs, women have not had an easy ride through the economic turmoil, either.

“The occupational structure has not somehow become more women-friendly,” said David Autor, an economist at M.I.T. who has studied the changing American job market. In fact, he added, “the hollowing out of middle-skill jobs was larger for women than for men.” The process intensified sharply during the financial crisis and the ensuing economic downturn.

But in general women have reacted much better, climbing the educational ladder to capture more of the better jobs. Today, 38 percent of women in their late 20s and early 30s have a college degree, compared with 15 percent 40 years ago. The completion rate for young men is now 7 percentage points lower than for women — back then it was 7 points higher.

This has given women an edge in the new job market: Today, almost 58 percent of registered nurses have a bachelor’s degree or more, compared with about a third in 1980.

This is true across the range of occupations capable of supporting a middle-class life. In 1980, 55 percent of workers who earned the equivalent of $40,000 to $80,000 in today’s dollars had at most a high school diploma, according to the analysis by The Times, which reviewed census returns for employed people ages 25 to 64. Only a quarter had a college degree. Today, the share of college graduates has risen to about 41 percent, while just under 31 percent have completed no more than high school.

“The days when a very, very substantial share of the work force would be able to make good middle-class incomes from jobs that did not require post-high school training are just not the case anymore,” said Francine D. Blau, an economics professor at Cornell University.

Men still hold most of the top jobs in the economy, including seven out of 10 jobs that pay over $80,000 a year. But women are rapidly moving up the ranks. Women hold 44 percent of middle-income jobs, compared with about a quarter 30 years ago.

These trends may not hold forever. Though educational attainment continues to rise for women, their progress in the workplace — in terms of both wages and jobs — has slowed significantly. Tighter controls on the cost of health care could weaken the job growth and pay raises helping support the new American middle. And while the industry is largely immune to foreign competition, it may be affected by advances in labor-saving technology.

Even as more women get ahead, many men are struggling to grab a handhold into higher-paying jobs. After her husband was laid off from a string of auto mechanic jobs, Donna Colbey, 53, urged him to switch careers and become a radiology technician.

It was a job Ms. Colbey knew would offer a good salary and require only two years of training. She had taken the same route, which eventually led her to a nursing career at a Washington hospital.

He enrolled in the courses but dropped out after a few months.

“He got tripped up over the math and didn’t go back,” said Ms. Colbey, who regularly picks up extra shifts to support her family.

A Relentless Pursuit

Far more is expected of nurses now than even two decades ago. Medical advances have kept patients alive longer, meaning many are sicker with more complex illnesses than in the past. Nurses must master technology that helps both treat and track patients, and they are called on to coordinate not just with doctors but also social workers and physical therapists.

At St. Mary’s Medical Center, Ms. Waugh, in her navy scrubs, fed potassium on a recent day into the vein of one woman with a broken hip who was on the cancer floor because of a lack of beds. She gave anti-nausea medicine to a moaning young man with liver cancer in the midst of chemotherapy and prepared pills for a half-dozen other patients, documenting it all on a computer.

An outpatient arrived for his regular blood-drawing and, squatting alongside him in a waiting room, Ms. Waugh unbuttoned his shirt and collected blood from an access port in his chest.

Ms. Waugh’s pursuit of learning to advance her career has been relentless. By her own count, she has been out of school for no longer than two years since kindergarten.

All that education has come with a cost. The couple has amassed about $50,000 in student debt. Ms. Waugh would like to send her children to a better school, but the $10,000 annual tuition that would require is out of reach. “I can’t save for their college and send them to private school,” she said.

To her husband’s co-workers who are raising families on pipe fitters’ salaries, the Waugh family is rich. Ms. Waugh’s purchase of a new Toyota S.U.V. raised eyebrows around the plant.

“We’re not wealthy,” Mr. Waugh said, “but we’re not poor.”

It hasn’t been easy getting to this point. As she made the rounds at the hospital, Ms. Waugh explained how her family was set back in 2008 after Collin was born. She stayed home for one year with the boy, who had digestive problems and required expensive formula. Living on just Mr. Waugh’s salary, they ran through their savings and they accumulated credit card debt that they are still paying off.

“That was a horrible financial situation,” Ms. Waugh said.

But later this year, when her classes and other course work are finished, Ms. Waugh will qualify as a nurse practitioner, a job that she expects will allow her to earn at least 50 percent more than her current salary. And she will be prepared, she believes, for almost anything to come.

“I knew if I was a nurse I could be self-sufficient,” she said, “and wouldn’t have to rely on anyone to take care of me.”

Source: www.nytimes.com

By JEFF SHARLET

The photograph that Markisha McClenton posted on Instagram is a self-portrait, a close-up that is muted in dim light. She might be on her way to work. She might be coming home. Her workdays begin and end in the dark, and they are dark in between. She’s a lab technician in Jacksonville, Fla. Her specialty is blood. She has worked these dark hours since her son was 7. “Freedom,” she told me over the phone from her lab. That’s why she works these hours: The freedom to work at night and to raise her children during the days. To her, this is good fortune. She is smiling in this photo. But her eyes are midnight eyes, 3 a.m. eyes. Why take a photo at that hour? “People forget about us, the night shift,” she said. The #nightshift. That’s the hashtag she used. It’s how I found her.

I’ve been working at night myself for a long time now. Once it was out of choice, a preference for the quiet hours. More recently it was because I had no choice. Insomnia. One night, I was drinking my third cup of coffee — because when you can’t sleep, you might as well stop trying — and ignoring the deadline looming the next morning. Instead, I stared at the matrix on my phone, my own red eyes scanning a tiny sample of some 670,000 photographs under #nightshift. Most of them were people like me, awake when they didn’t want to be awake. And like me, they were looking at the screen in their hands, held up by the one in mine.

Night Life

This is the ghost world of #graveyardshift (#nightshift’s sister hashtag), whose workers file into Instagram every evening. These pictures may be clever or maudlin, silly or harrowing or sad. “Desperate” is a word that comes to mind, but so does “resigned.” And even “resistance.” Sometimes it’s in the form of a gag, a ridiculous pose; sometimes it’s in the form of a gaze so steady that it seems to warm the fluorescent panels framing so many of these pictures. The hashtag itself is a form of solidarity.

There are the warehouse workers who snap themselves letting a wisp of marijuana smoke slip from between their lips, little Instagram rebellions. There are the soldiers and sailors pulling a night shift for no good reason other than orders, photographing themselves and their comrades on the verge of sleep or already under. Cops in noirish black and white, their pictures framed to show a bit of badge. And nurses. A lot of nurses. Close-up, arm’s length, forced smiles, dead eyes. Scroll through #nightshift, and you’ll see some saints among them and some whose hands you hope will be more alive in an emergency than their ashen faces.

The #nightshift hashtag is especially well populated by the armed professions and the healing ones. Sometimes they are almost one and the same, as in the case of @armedmedic3153, a.k.a. Marcelo Aguirre, a paramedic in Newark and suburban New Jersey. He owns an AR-15, a ­9-millimeter­ and a shotgun, but the only thing he shoots on the night shift is his camera. He works nights so he can study days; he wants to be a doctor. Nights are good preparation for that: You get more serious cases. You learn on the job. A 12-hour course each night you’re on. Twenty-four hours if you take a double. After a while, the adrenaline that juices you when you’re new — when you’re still keeping a tally of the lives you’ve saved — disappears. You just do the job. “High speed and low drag,” Aguirre told me when I called. “Please ignore the siren,” he said. “We’re going to a call.” A stroke. Nothing to get excited about. Coffee sustains him. He stays clean. Some guys, he said, use Provigil, but that’s prescribed. “For shift-work disorder,” he said.

Markisha McClenton, the lab tech, told me that she no longer gets sleepy. “I program myself,” she said. She wouldn’t change her schedule now if she could. She likes working alone. There are nurses at the facility where she works, but they don’t often venture back to the lab. “They think it’s creepy,” she said. “At night.” Maybe it is: The long hours of the night shift are a reckoning with time.

“There’s people still struggling like I struggle,” a miner named Mike Tatum told me, explaining why he posts pictures and why he looks at them. “Working through the night, not sleeping next to your wife, missing your kids because they go to school before you get home.” Tatum likes to post pictures of the heavy machines used to dig coal from Wyoming strip mines. He drives a D-11 bulldozer. “I push dirt,” he said. Other machines dig the coal. Twelve hours of ‘dozing, four nights in a row. He came to this job — a good one, $30 an hour or more for as long as the coal lasts — after construction work dried up in California. “Nobody back home has really seen what we do out here,” he said. It’s a good job, he swears. He’s brought his 6-year-old boy out to see the machines. He’d be proud if his kids grew up to be miners. A good job. Rough on the back. But you’re just sitting. Driving the ‘dozer. Nobody bothers you. Hours without a word. “Pretty easy,” he said. Plenty of time to think. To make plans. Things he can do with his days, when he has days.

So far, this is enough to see him through the nights safely. “Quite a few fatalities the past year,” he observed. He heard about a man at another mine who drove a machine into the pit. “Maybe a suicide.” It didn’t seem like an accident; he had to drive through a couple of berms. “Splat,” Tatum said. “And a couple more like that.” He says other guys have died on the road, Highway 59. It’s a long drive out to the mines, and drug testing never stopped anyone from drinking, especially after the shift is over.

Pan out to take in some fraction of the 670,000 faces. Pay attention to the eyes, drooping or unnaturally wide. Is it fatigue? Or something more? Something less? Stay sane, and the night shift may seem like just another set of hours. Lose yourself to the loneliness, and the daylight leaks out of you. But something else can come in. A kind of calm. The kindness of dark hours.

When I was first drawn into this nighttime Insta­gram grid, I was looking for a distraction, for ­images to displace the thoughts that had agitated me to exhaustion. What I found instead was something that seemed descended from Walt Whitman’s “Democratic Vistas,” his great prose poem of an essay that was really a proposal for a new kind of literature, a way of speaking, a way of seeing. We shouldn’t mistake Instagram’s squares for the public one. But neither should we miss the quiet dig­nity afforded by gathering under this hashtag: the solidarity of recognition, of being seen.

“Nightwalkers,” Pierre Bell calls the men and women who find their peace after-hours. He’s new to the night himself, working as a nurse’s aide on the behavior unit at an assisted-living home in Akron, Ohio. “What’s behavior?” I asked. “Combative,” he said. “Lockdown. Spit, kick, hit, bite.” Sounds terrible, I said. It’s not, he told me, especially at night, when the anger subsides, and when the alarm I can hear beeping in the background is an event rather than a constant song. The other aide will get that one. Bell, a 28-year-old father of a 9-month-old, was sitting with the nightwalkers. The strange ones, the restless ones, the story­tellers. “Some were in wars,” he told me. “Some were teachers.” Sometimes they talk for hours. If they’re up, he’s up. It feels to him like a matter of courtesy. The behavior unit is his patients’ home. He’s only visiting. Trying out the night they live in.

And on his break, he can slip away. Take a snapshot, make a record of himself in this new country of the other hours, post it on Instagram as ­@piebell522.­ He took the one that caught my eye when he was in the bathroom. “I saw the dark behind me,” he said. “I thought it could be a picture.” A lovely one, as was the shot that followed hours later: Bell’s baby boy, the reason he works the night shift. Not for the money but for the days he can spend with his son, a handsome little guy with his father’s gentle eyes, but warmer in the golden sunlight of the morning.

Source: www.nytimes.com

Nurses are an important part of the medical workforce. They provide crucial supplementary services and are primary caregivers in a lot of industries. As such, the demand for nurses is high, though there are variations according to different states. As the country’s population and access to medicine continues to grow, the demand for nurses does as well.

Source: http://online.adu.edu

By Debra Anscombe Wood, RN

While credentials may seem like an alphabet soup after one’s name, the letters tell the world much about a nurse’s qualifications, including licensure, certifications and fellowships.  

“Credentials are not only a source of pride for the nurse, but communicate to patients, colleagues and hospital leaders the nurse’s commitment to standards of excellence,” said Mary Frances Pate, PhD, RN, CNS, associate professor at the University of Portland School of Nursing in Oregon and chairwoman of the board of directors for AACN Certification Corporation, the certification organization for the American Association of Critical-Care Nurses.

Other academic nurses agree. “Credentials matter to the public,” said Rebecca M. Patton, MSN, RN, CNOR, FAAN, Lucy Jo Atkinson Scholar in Perioperative Nursing at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, adding that they also demonstrate growth and lifelong learning valuable to the nurse and to nurse managers and administrators.

Depending on the position, “some nursing positions require certification demonstrating expertise, and some do not,” said Robert Hanks, PhD, FNP-C, RNC, assistant professor and clinical/FNP track director at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston School of Nursing. 

Marianne Horahan, MBA, MPH, RN, CPHQ, director of certification services at the American Nurses Credentialing Center, reported an increase in certification applications this year, in part because of employers’ promotion of certification. A new “Success Pays” program allows the hospital to directly pay for successful exam completion. 

Employers also seek nurses with degrees, as evidence suggests organizations with a higher percentage of BSN- or MSN-prepared nurses have greater patient outcomes, said Paulette Heitmeyer, MSN/ED, RN, CNO at Marina Del Rey Hospital in California. 

Pate said nurses whose clinical skills and judgment have been validated through certification often make patient care decisions with greater confidence, recognize problems and intervene appropriately.

While many believe credentials lead to better care and patient outcomes, research is limited. The Institute of Medicine recently released a research agenda to help fill this gap. 

Nurses should list the highest degree first, immediately after their name, then licensure, any state designations, national certifications, awards, honors and other recognitions, according to the ANCC. 

“Certification provides a foundation for lifelong learning and professional development,” Horahan said. “The purpose of certification is to assure the public that this individual has mastered the body of knowledge and acquired skills in the specialty.”

Source: http://news.nurse.com

By JOANN S. LUBLIN

Is there such a thing as a diversity dividend?

A new study of 366 public companies in the U.S., Canada, U.K., Brazil, Mexico and Chile by McKinsey & Co., a major management consultancy, found a statistically significant relationship between companies with women and minorities in their upper ranks and better financial performance as measured by earnings before interest and tax, or EBIT.

The findings could further fuel employers’ efforts to increase the ranks of women and people of color for executive suites and boardrooms — an issue where some progress is being made, albeit slowly.

McKinsey researchers examined the gender, ethnic and racial makeup of top management teams and boards for large concerns across a range of industries as of 2014.  Then, they analyzed the firms’ average earnings before interest and taxes between 2010 and 2013. They collected but didn’t analyze other financial measures such as return on equity.

Businesses with the most gender diverse leadership were 15% more likely to report financial returns above their national industry median, the study showed. An even more striking link turned up at concerns with extensive ethnic diversity. Those best performers were 35% more likely to have financial returns that outpace their industry, according to the analysis. The report did not disclose specific companies.

Highly diverse companies appear to excel financially due to their talent recruitment efforts, strong customer orientation, increased employee satisfaction and improved decision making, the report said.  Those possible factors emerged from prior McKinsey research about diversity.

McKinsey cited “measurable progress” among U.S. companies, where women now represent about 16% of executive teams — compared with 12% for U.K. ones and 6% for Brazilian ones.  But American businesses don’t see a financial payoff from gender diversity “until women constitute at least 22% of a senior executive team,’’ the study noted.  (McKinsey tracked 186 U.S. and Canadian firms.)

The study marks the first time “that the impact of ethnic and gender diversity on financial performance has been looked at for an international sample of companies,’’ said Vivian Hunt, a co-author, in an interview.  Yet “no company is a high performer on both ethnic diversity and on gender,’’ she reported.

And “very few U.S. companies yet have a systematic approach to diversity that is able to consistently achieve a diverse global talent pool,” Ms. Hunt added.

McKinsey has long tracked workplace diversity. A 2007 study, for instance, uncovered a positive relationship between corporate performance and the elevated presence of working women in European countries such as the U.K., France and Germany.

Source: http://blogs.wsj.com

By Bridgid Joseph

Changing jobs can be a stressful process for some because of the dreaded interview process. But there are a few pretty simple tips that can help put you, and your interviewer, at ease to make for a much better experience, and lead you closer to that new job you’ve been wanting! Stop letting the interview process paralyze your career.

For most people, the worst part of thinking about changing positions, or getting a new job, is the interview process. Maybe you are someone who gets nervous and sweats, shakes, or just can’t focus on the questions being asked, which makes the interviewing process torturous for you, something you dread, and guess what?

If you feel awkward and uncomfortable, so does the person interviewing you. As someone who has moved around quite a bit, interviewed for numerous jobs, and scored an offer each time (not to toot my own horn), I have learned some tricks to interview well, that are applicable to most people. And as someone who now interviews applicants, I have a whole new perspective of what and interviewer “sees” during an interview; there are some small Do’s and Don’ts that can make you appear more poised and ready than you may feel!

DO Dress the Part:

Even though you may be coming in for an interview for your first job as a nurse, Medical Assistant (MA), Patient Care Technician (PCT), etc. you want to dress as if you are coming in for a job as a Director or the Chief Nursing Officer. I am not telling you to spend a ton of money on some fancy suit, but you want to look nicely put together with clothes that fit you well and look nice.

I was walking from my car to an interview and I was wearing these great fitted pants that I found on sale at one of my favorite stores and couldn't believe they were 60% off, they looked great, fit great, and with a top that I already owned, and a pair of smart black shoes, I felt (and looked) like a million bucks. Until I tripped a little, looked down, and realized the hem gave away on one of my pant legs (probably why such an amazing pair of pants were on such a super sale in my size), so I acted quickly, hobbled quickly to my car, did a little “runway” hem with some tape that I had in my car (i.e. I taped up the hem inside of my pants), and went back on my way. 

Even though it was a bit of smoke and mirrors show, no one knew that my pants were taped together, and I even got complimented on how great my outfit looked. You don’t need to spend a lot, to look like a lot, but looking neat in nicely fitting clothes, shows that you are putting in the effort to put your best foot forward and show yourself in the best light. 

DON’T Dress for a Night Out or a Day of Work:

If you are applying for a clinical job, yes it is awesome that we get to wear scrubs to work everyday, and it does make those of us that work clinically, at a deficit for “business” attire in our wardrobes, but it doesn't make it acceptable for us to wear scrubs to an interview. You also want to make sure that you aren't wearing something that you would choose to wear out to a bar/nightclub with your friends. 

I have seen quite a few outfits in my time that make me think twice about the applicants common sense. Don’t make the interviewer question your common sense; that means you have set yourself up to have to prove your intelligence and critical thinking skills, despite what your resume might say!

(I realize I put this in twice, but I can’t tell you how many times I have seen people really inappropriately dressed for interviews!!)

DO Have Good Posture: 

Did you know that sitting straight up and keeping your shoulders back make you appear smarter, attentive, and more of a leader?

Well, it does. I may be interviewing you for a position in an entry level, but I am more apt to hire someone that shows me they can be a leader within their position and will work hard and role model their leadership skills. And if they stay in their position, they will hopefully move up the ranks quickly.

DON’T Oversell Yourself: 

A big mistake interviewees make is overselling their skills. If you don’t have a certain skill set for a job you are interviewing for, that’s OK. Not everyone is an expert in their field when they first start, right? 

We all start somewhere. So when you are asked, for example, “How comfortable are you taking care of a patient on with an intraaortic balloon pump?” and you think “A WHAT?!?!?”

Don’t sweat it, and give an honest response such as, “I haven’t had the experience of taking care of such a patient, but I have extensive other skills, such as [insert skills here] that I learned quickly, and I would love the opportunity to learn more about those patients and their specific needs. Is this a common patient type on your unit?” 

You do two things with that answer...

You let me look back at your resume to review your skills, and you also show that you are interested in this experience and willing to learn. I may be looking for a more experienced nurse, but I will definitely consider you and your willingness to learn as a huge asset; I would rather hire someone motivated to learn and improve than someone who is stagnant in their learning process and no longer feels excited about their role. 

DO Be Honest on Your Resume: 

Sometimes it is glaringly obvious when people tell mistruths on their resumes, and sometimes it isn't, but it usually becomes obvious during an interview. I have had perspectives that added some skills into their resume that they don’t have, and through standard interview questions, it got quite awkward as I realized they did not have the skills they boasted about. (see don’t oversell yourself!)

DO Be Positive: 

As with all experiences in life, if you walk in feeling positive, confident, with a big smile on your face, and an open mind, you can win over almost anyone! There is no need to be nervous as the worst thing that can happen is that the job isn't a match; so think positively and imagine that you already have the job, and your interview will be a great experience. 

If you want a change in your career/life, send out those resumes and get your interview smile on and go get that new job! 

Source: http://allnurses.com

By Cynthia Howard RN, CNC, Phd

Finding the right nursing job includes finding a manager that will help you grow, develop, and support your career goals.

There is a saying that people leave their managers and not their jobs and to have success in your career may mean you want to circulate your resume in order to find the best fit for you. This means you have to know what you want and need in the area of support.

Here are 10 warning signs you may be working with the wrong manager:

1. You never hear from your manager prior to your performance reviews. Over 75% of performance problems can be improved with proper feedback and less than 33% of the time, feedback is provided.
    
2. You have no idea what they want.  This can be worse than not having feedback at all. When a manager says, “I do not like how you did that,” you really have no way of knowing what they really mean. Make sure to ask for clarification. Review your job description and ask for your manager to specify what parts of your job responsibilities are most important to them. It could be they are focused on patient safety and you have an interest in health literacy. Knowing what they want gives you the advantage of focusing your efforts for the greatest gain.
    
3. It is their way or the highway.  This is a problem for many nurses. Job satisfaction comes with autonomy and the opportunity to solve your own problems as they show up on the job. When a manager consistently tells you what and how to do something, employees quickly turn off their own creativity; more than likely, with an increase in mistakes.
   
   A nurse who is practicing for 7 years shared a story about his experience on a new unit. His Clinical Specialist was a micro-manager. She told him to give this medication immediately because of incoming admissions. She had poured the med. This went against his better judgment but because he knew she would have a fit, he gave it, to the wrong patient. She was extremely apologetic however the “error” was on him. Do not compromise your judgment for the sake of status quo.
    
4. Your manager wants you to figure it out.  The opposite of micro-managing is to not manage at all and letting everyone figure it out for themselves. This happens quite a bit leaving the power position to go to the most domineering individuals on the unit. Everyone needs to know the manager is in charge and when needed will make those tough decisions.
    
5. You could not recognize them if your life depended on it.  If your manager hides behind email or a closed door, having a relationship with your manager will be impossible. Communication and trust is the foundation of a great working relationship.  
   
   Suggestion for managers: Time is an important commodity and getting around to all your staff can be time consuming. Why not use technology and set up a short video. Most iPhones take excellent video. Take 2-3 minutes every week and share what is going on. You may also want to share something personal about yourself; if you just started juicing, kickboxing, celebrated an anniversary or a milestone with your children. Interview them, show images along your morning run, and share something of yourself in order to make the connection with your staff.
   
   Suggestion for staff: Make a short video on your unit of a new initiative, gratitude board in the break room, more efficient way to give report, a snippet of rounds, and just a friendly hello from everyone on the unit. You may even want to say thanks and express appreciation; managers are people too!
    
6. The way out the door is faster than up. If you have a manager that makes any attempt for you to advance your skills difficult, it will be hard to boost your resume. Managers can feel threatened by qualified staff members who want to move up the ladder and may indirectly thwart your efforts to move forward. This is really short sighted on the manager’s part because any manager that turns our qualified leaders actually looks really good to their higher ups given the ongoing need for good talent in any organization.
    
7. Lack of training.  Being able to do a job well requires the right training. Often it takes the manager to assess the need for training based on performance and outcomes. This relates to the lack of feedback. While every employee really should do their own assessment of what they need to do well and then make the request of their manager, the manager should also be on the lookout for staff that need training and set up opportunities to make this happen.
    
8. When the manager has obvious “favorites.”  Everyone has preferences in personality style, but when the manager consistently selects one particular individual for all the initiatives, opportunities for advancement, or other assignments that provide variety, the manager is sending a message to others they do not care about your skills or your future.
    
9. When your manager routinely says, “I’ll think about it.”  Obviously considering all sides of the problem/ situation is important however some managers hide behind this and never make a decision about what is the ideal way to go.  Quickly, this can be frustrating if you are looking for a course of action to solve a problem.
    
10. When your manager over reacts or criticizes you in front of others.  This is a toxic behavior and is an indication you want to find a new place to work. Quickly this will diminish your self-esteem, leading to resentment and stagnation.
    
    Knowing what you want in the way of workplace is key and will help you avoid a poor manager. What type of opportunities are you looking for in the workplace? What are your career goals? Evaluate the workplace, ask questions, find out the management style, review a performance appraisal, ask about turnover, and see if you can build a relationship with your new manager.  

Enjoy the opportunity to find a place that truly supports and honors you! 

Source: www.nursetogether.com

That’s right—there are men in nursing, too! It’s time to rid ourselves of outdated stereotypes. We don’t live in a society where boys only like blue and girls only like pink. Where boys can only play with legos and girls can only play with dolls. There’s too much variety in this world to limit ourselves to what we think is expected of us. There are women in engineering and mathematics, and there are men in nursing and healthcare.

Population Growing for Men in Nursing

Nursing is a fantastic career. In fact, the number of men in nursing is growing, with the percentage of male nurses increasing almost every year. In addition, there are more men in nursing schools, making up 13% of nursing school students. Find out more facts about male nurses by reading the men in nursing infographic below.

Source: www.collegeamerica.edu

By Debra Wood

One out of every six newly licensed nurses (more than 17 percent) leave their first nursing job within the first year and one out of every three (33.5 percent) leave within two years. But not all nurse turnover is bad, according to a new study from the RN Work Project, funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

“It seemed high,” said Carol S. Brewer, PhD, RN, FAAN, professor at the University at Buffalo School of Nursing and co-director of the RN Work Project, the only longitudinal study of registered nurses conducted in the United States. “Most of them take a new job in a hospital. We’ve emphasized who left their first job, but it doesn’t mean they have left hospital work necessarily.”

While many nursing leaders have voiced concern that high turnover among new nurses may result in a loss of those nurses to the profession, that’s not what the RN Work Project team has found. Most of those leaving move on to another job in health care.

“Not only are they staying in health care, they are staying in health care as nurses,” said Christine T. Kovner, PhD, RN, FAAN, professor at the New York University College of Nursing and co-director of the RN Work Project. “Very few leave. A tiny percent become a case manager or work for an insurance company, verifying people had the right treatment.”

Such outside jobs tend to offer better hours, with no nights or weekends. The nurses are still using their knowledge and skills but they are not providing hands-on care.

The RN Work Project looks at nurse turnover from the first job, and the majority of first jobs are in the hospital setting, Brewer explained. However, in the sample, nurses working in other settings had higher turnover rates than those working in acute care.

Kovner hypothesized that since new nurses are having a harder time finding first jobs in hospitals, they may begin their careers in a nursing home and leave when a hospital position opens up. On the other hand, those who succeed in landing a hospital job may feel the need to stay at least a year, because that’s what many nursing professors recommend. Hospitals also tend to offer better benefits, such as tuition reimbursement and child care, and hold an attraction for new nurses.

“Our students, if they could get a job in an ICU, they’d be happy, and the other place they want to work is the emergency room,” Kovner said. “They want to save lives, every day.”

The RN Work Project data excludes nurses who have left their first position at a hospital for another in the same facility, which is disruptive to the unit but may be a positive for the organization overall, since the nurse knows the culture and policies. The nurse may change to come off the night shift or to obtain a position in a specialty unit, such as pediatrics.

“That’s an example of the type of turnover an organization likes,” Kovner said. “You have an experienced nurse going to the ICU [or another unit].”

While nurse turnover represents a high cost for health care employers, as much as $6.4 million for a large acute care hospital, some departures of RNs is good for the workplace. Brewer, Kovner and colleagues describe the difference between dysfunctional and functional turnover in the paper, published in the journal Policy, Politics & Nursing Practice.

“Dysfunctional is when the good people leave,” Brewer said.

The RN Work Project has not differentiated between voluntary and involuntary departures, the latter of which may be due to poor performance or downsizing. And some nurse turnover is beneficial.

“If you never had turnover, the organization would become stagnant,” Kovner added. “It’s useful to have some people leave, particularly the people you want to leave. It offers the opportunity to have new blood come in.”

New nursing graduates might bring with them the latest knowledge, and more seasoned nurses may bring ideas proven successful at other organizations.

Once again, Brewer and Kovner report managers or direct supervisors play a big role in nurses leaving their jobs. Organizations hoping to reduce turnover could consider more management training for people in those roles.

“Leadership seems a big issue,” Brewer said. “The supervisor support piece has been consistent.”

Both nurse researchers cited the challenge of measuring nurse turnover accurately. Organizations and researchers often describe it differently, Brewer said. And hospitals often do not want to release information about their turnover rates, since nurses would most likely apply to those with lower rates, Kovner added. When assessing nurse turnover data, she advises looking at the response rate and the methodology used.

“There are huge inconsistencies in reports about turnover,” Kovner said. “It’s extremely important managers and policy makers understand where the data came from.”

Source: www.nursezone.com