DiversityNursing Blog

Source: www.trocaire.edu/trailblazer-blog

Historically, both men and women have filled the challenging and rewarding role of a nurse. It wasn’t until the Civil War, when nearly 3 million men filled the ranks of two competing American armed forces, that women began to dominate the field.

Today, over 43 million Americans are aged 65 or older – a number that is expected to double over the next 35 years. A larger elderly population means a greater need for long-term health services, and as a result, the healthcare field is one of the fastest-growing industries.

Why does this matter?

 1. The U.S. is already on the verge of a nursing shortage. 

The American Association of Colleges of Nursing reports that the U.S. is experiencing a shortage of Registered Nurses (RNs) that is expected to intensify as Baby Boomers age and the need for health care grows.

Did you know only 7 percent of nurses are currently men?   According to the latest National Sample Survey of Registered Nurses conducted by the Health Resources and Services Administration, the percentage of male nurses has more than doubled in the past three decades, but still lingers at 7% today. This number is expected to triple within the next few decades as the need for both male and female healthcare professionals continues to grow.

2. A diverse population needs a diverse nursing staff. 

According to the American Association of Colleges of Nursing (AACN), men are enrolling in nursing programs at a higher rate compared to the past. The IOM report states that there still need to be an emphasis on gender diversification and inclusion in the workforce.

The IOM Report also states that the nursing profession “needs to continue efforts to recruit men; their unique perspectives and skills are important to the profession and will help contribute additional diversity in the workforce.”  The increase in men pursuing a nursing career will help create a more diverse healthcare environment. 

3. Discrimination issues must be overcome.

The idea that men cannot be nurses will never be eradicated until men take to the profession in greater numbers. While nursing is seen as a nontraditional career for men today, the stereotype must change -- nursing is simply too important of a job, and too attractive of a career.

“There are just far too many benefits that come along with nursing, such as a flexible schedule, a secure position, and high pay,” notes the website NursingWithoutBorders.org, “and so it’s therefore difficult for anyone to refuse to pursue a field that only continues to grow.”

Nurses’ Health Study recruits “next generation”

Boston, MA - From the dangers of tobacco and trans fats to the benefits of physical activity and whole grains, much of what we know about health today is thanks to the Nurses’ Health Study.

Researchers are recruiting 100,000 nurses and nursing students to join the long-running Nurses’ Health Study and expand its landmark research on health and well-being. And for the very first time, male nurses and students are being invited to join. 

RNs, LPNs, and nursing students between the ages of 19 and 46 who live in the US or Canada are eligible to join the study. More than 38,000 have signed up already, and recruitment will stay open until the goal of 100,000 participants is reached.

Researchers hope to engage a highly diverse group of nurses in the “next generation” of the study. For the first time, nursing students are eligible to enroll.

In order to make participation as convenient as possible for busy nurses, participants can join online and complete the study’s surveys through a secure website, http://www.nhs3.org/.

More than 250,000 nurses have participated in the study since the 1970s. By completing confidential lifestyle surveys, they have helped advance medical knowledge about nutrition, exercise, cancer, heart disease, and many other conditions.

“Nurses were originally recruited for their expertise in accurately reporting health data,” explains Dr. Walter Willett, the study’s lead researcher and Chair of the Nutrition Department at Harvard School of Public Health in Boston, Mass. “Their involvement has been invaluable, and their dedication is remarkable—an astounding 90% of them are still enrolled, decades later! The new group, NHS3, will allow us understand how today’s lifestyle and environment affect a person’s health in the future.”

Nurses enrolled in the earlier studies are encouraging their children and younger colleagues to join. “My mom started filling out surveys when the study began,” one nurse recently commented on the NHS3 Facebook page (www.facebook.com/NHS3.org). “I am so proud to be part of this study and see what it has done.”

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NURSES’ HEALTH STUDIES
Started in 1976 and expanded in 1989, the Nurses’ Health Studies have led to many important insights on health and well-being, including cancer prevention, cardiovascular disease, and diabetes. Most importantly, these studies showed that diet, physical activity, and other lifestyle factors can powerfully promote better health.

Contact: Michael Keating
617-432-7078

 nhs3@channing.harvard.edu

SOURCE Nurses Health Study 3    www.nhs3.org

Source: www.rntobsnonlineprogram.com

BY ROSE RUSSELL

Kevin Cischke left a music career after 25 years to pursue a new one in nursing, and it won’t bother him that he’ll be a man in a profession largely dominated by women.

As the face of the nursing profession slowly changes, Mr. Cischke, 45, is among the growing number of men signing up for the job. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, slightly less than 10 percent of the 3.5 million nurses in 2011 were men. That’s up from 1970, when only 2.7 percent of nurses were males.

For Mr. Cischke – who will receive a bachelor’s in nursing next year from Mercy College — nursing is in line with his interests. When introduced to nursing, the former organist and choir master for the Archdiocese of Detroit fell in love with it.

“A couple of my close friends who are nurses said I should look into this profession to see if it would interest me,” he said, during a break from his externship in the emergency room at Mercy St. Vincent Medical Center. “It was a whirlwind love affair that has not ended, and I don’t suspect that it will.”

Craig Albers, chief nursing officer and vice president of patient care services at Mercy St. Charles Hospital, said men in nursing offer an important component in the delivery of public health care.

“In the past, nursing was more of a pink collar profession and more of a career for women. A lot of times it’s seen as a profession for Caucasian women. Now, with large numbers of baby boomers retiring and seeking health care, we need a diverse workforce able to work with a diverse population,” said Mr. Albers.

A nurse himself since 1998, he began his college studies pharmacy. When he decided he needed more patient interaction, a professor suggested he look into nursing.

“I job shadowed an ICU nurse and the role really appealed to me. That’s what led me to the profession,” he said.

It was the patients who also attracted Mr. Cischke.

"I enjoy the patient-care side of things. I wanted hands-on patient care. That's what drives me, and the fact that I can continue to learn and grow fits my personality perfectly," he said.

He also liked contributing to the profession and addressing concerns of his male peers. In fact, when they discovered something missing in their nursing school experience, he led the way to establishing a local chapter of the American Assembly of Men in Nursing. The organization addresses issues that affect men in nursing. About 20 men and five women are members of the group.

"I continued to explore what the assembly had to offer, promote, and to accomplish and I realized that their goals aligned with what we needed to have at Mercy to support our male students," said Mr. Cishke, one of 116 male students in the nursing program.

The organization will also help groom male nurses for retiring baby boomers who increasingly use health care. Health professionals who deliver care to boomers must be on their toes.

"Our baby boomer population will be very informed and knowledgeable and Internet and computer savvy, and people going into the nursing profession will have to be extremely knowledgeable and confident and able to communicate with their patients because the patients are very knowledgeable," said Mr. Albers.

While male nurses' physical strength is also a plus for patient care, Mr. Albers said more men joining the field may pursue advanced fields in nursing, such as management, administration, business, and anesthetics. Those advanced career possibilities attracted Daniel Koehler to the profession.

He received a bachelor's in nursing from Lourdes University in December. Eight years ago, he obtained a bachelor's in human biology from Michigan State University. He then worked in the restaurant and fitness businesses before going to nursing school.

He wasn't intimidated by the predominantly female profession, and in fact received positive responses from others.

"Most guys don't grow up thinking they want to be nurses," as many girls do, said Mr. Koehler, whose mother was a nurse in Germany. "With the guys I've met in the profession, I think less of that stigma now days."

Though slightly less than 10 percent of ProMedica's nurses are men and slightly more than 8 percent of the nurses in the Mercy health system are men, the idea that nursing is a woman's job stopped Roberta Pratte's father and grandfather, both medics in the military, from continuing in the profession. As a teenager, Ms. Pratte — a Mercy nursing professor — recalls hearing her grandfather speak fondly about nursing.

"Back then it wasn't something that men talked about or thought about. I sensed that they regretted that they were not allowed to follow their dream," said Ms. Pratte, an instructor at Mercy College. She has been a nurse for 33 years, and her mother was also a nurse.

Large numbers of nurses are expected to retire soon, adding to the already critical nursing shortage. That's why the profession is pushing to attract men and women into nursing. As a matter of fact, the American Assembly for Men in Nursing is campaigning to increase the number of male nurses by 20 percent by the year 2020, said Ms. Pratte. She also said the Institute of Medicine and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are reviewing how to fill nursing positions to ensure that the public gets proper care.

Source: toledoblade.com

By AGATA BLASZCZAK-BOXE

Do men and women feel pain differently? A new study finds an unexpected gender divide.

Researchers found that men tend to report feeling more pain after major surgeries than women, whereas women tend to report experiencing more pain after minor surgical procedures than men.

In the study, researchers found that men were 27 percent more likely to report higher pain ratings after a major surgery such as a knee replacement, while women were 34 percent more likely to report experiencing more pain after procedures that the researchers labeled as minor, such as biopsies. (The researchers differentiated between "major" and "minor" procedures depending on the intensity of pain that people typically expect to feel after a particular procedure.)

To conduct the study, the researchers interviewed 10,200 patients from the University Hospitals of the Ruhr University of Bochum, Germany, following an operation, over more than four years. About 42 percent of the patients were male and 58 percent were female.

Initially, the study authors didn't find significant differences between the genders in people's overall experience of postoperative pain. However, that changed when the researchers distinguished between different kinds of surgeries.

The researchers are not sure where these differences stem from; however, they speculate that a lot may depend on the kind of surgery a person is undergoing. For instance, procedures such as cancer-related biopsies or an abortion may take a particularly serious emotional toll on women, and therefore exacerbate their individual perceptions of pain.

"It could be anxiety," study author Dr. Andreas Sandner-Kiesling of Medical University of Graz, Austria, told CBS News.

"This is a very interesting study," Dr. M. Fahad Khan, an assistant professor in the Department of Anesthesiology at NYU Langone Medical Center, told CBS News. "Ten thousand patients in any type of study is a huge number, and it is really great to see studies on that number of patients because it can limit a lot of the bias that some studies have."

Khan noted he found it interesting that in women, even smaller procedures "can be fraught with the development of pain problems after the procedure," which many people may not expect when they go to the hospital for a simple biopsy, he said.

Sandner-Kiesling said he did not think the findings should change the way men and women are treated for pain. "Clinically, there is no relevance," he said.

According to certain popular cultural stereotypes, women are often considered to be tougher about dealing with pain than men, but is this really the case?

"Anecdotally, people will say that women have a higher threshold for pain and they are more tolerant to pain, just because of their life experience. And perhaps, emotionally, maybe they are stronger than men," Khan said. "However, medically, in my experience, we haven't really noticed much of a difference with regard to men and women in the development of problems with dealing with severe and chronic pain."

The new study is presented at this year's Euroanaesthesia meeting in Stockholm.

Source:cbsnews.com

Written by Sarah Okeson

Joe Long first thought of becoming a nurse when his wife was hospitalized for a week during her pregnancy with their second child. He now works at Mercy Hospital Springfield, taking care of patients in the intensive care unit.

“Nursing is manly,” Long said. “It’s not just for women.”

About 6.6 percent of nurses nationwide are male, according to the American Association of Colleges of Nursing. In Springfield, about 7.3 percent of nurses at CoxHealth are male. At Mercy, about 11.4 percent of the nurses are male.

The American Assembly of Men in Nursing was formed in 1971 in Michigan to provide support for male nurses. An Ozarks chapter is being started. There are also chapters in St. Louis and Kansas City. The organization also is open to women.

“It’s a very female-oriented world and we’re OK with that, but men still need to socialize,” said Paul Pope, the chapter president and a nursing instructor at Southwest Baptist University.

The executive director of nursing at Mercy Hospital Springfield is a male nurse, Kurtis Abbey.

Nurses like him have faced some of the obstacles that women entering predominantly male fields have faced. There have been lawsuits and complaints about isolation.

Rick Leroux, a nursing instructor at Southwest Baptist, got into nursing with the encouragement of his aunt. He learned how to make chitchat with children and to be absolutely honest about whether a medical procedure would hurt.

He treasures moments such as an encounter with the adult daughter of a man he had cared for who had a heart attack. She hugged Leroux and thanked him.

“Those are the moments we live for,” Leroux said.

Female employees at Mercy said they appreciate male nurses when it comes to lifting patients. They also value other qualities such as help in dealing with sometimes-disruptive families.

“We have a lot of difficult patients,” said Becky Pierce, who has worked at Mercy for about 40 years. “For each difficult patient, you have family members who sometimes need the physical presence of a man.”

Dr. Tobey Cronnell said male nurses tend to be more supportive of female doctors.

“I particularly enjoy working with male nurses as a female physician,” Cronnell said.

Long recently tended to John Goar, 73, who was admitted to Mercy Hospital Springfield after having trouble breathing.

Long gave him insulin and some other medication and then told Goar that his relatives were on their way to visit.

“He’s as good as a woman,” Goar said.

Long left Goar’s room. He was about halfway through his 12-hour shift. He doesn’t miss his previous career as a loan officer for a mortgage company.

“It’s the first time I have a job where I actually look forward to going to work,” he said.

Source: News-Leader.com

By Christina Orlovsky

Ask a young girl what she wants to be when she grows up, and top answers are often a teacher or a nurse, which are professions that have been associated with women throughout history. Ask a young boy the same question and neither answer is likely to be given.

Ask Christopher Lance Coleman, PhD, MS, MPH, FAAN, and he’ll tell you that inequity has to change.

Coleman, an associate professor of nursing and multicultural diversity at the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing in Philadelphia and the author of Man Up! A Practical Guide for Men in Nursing, is a strong advocate for recruiting males into the nursing workforce and empowering them to pursue leadership roles. His new book serves as a roadmap for men seeking to break into the predominantly female nursing profession.

“I believe men need a guide, a blueprint to use to navigate through the complexity of specialty choice and a culture where, frankly, a gender disparity still exists,” Coleman explains. “This is an opportunity of a lifetime for men not only to change the face of nursing in the 21st century, but also to reshape the public image that nursing is a women’s profession.”

In fact, while the most recent numbers show that men are still a clear minority in the nursing field, an uptick is occurring. According to a 2012 U.S. Census Bureau study, “Men in Nursing Occupations,” which presents data from the 2011 American Community Survey, the percentage of male nurses has more than tripled since 1970, from 2.7 percent to 9.6 percent. Of the 3.5 million employed nurses in 2011, 3.2 million were female and 330,000 were male. It’s a change, but, if you ask Coleman, it’s not enough.

“The startling thing is how underrepresented men still are in areas of leadership,” he says. “While the numbers of RNs has increased, when you look at the profession as a whole--heads of nursing, academia--we are still so far underrepresented. This is significant for males going through school looking for role models and seeing predominantly female leaders. I want men to know this is a viable profession and there are tremendous opportunities out there.”

Coleman believes the greatest opportunities for change are in younger men, who even at the high school level should do their research and start the conversation with their parents about the opportunities that exist for them in nursing. Ethnic minority groups, he adds, are particularly critical.

“Many ethnic minority groups, even today in 2013, still think of nursing as only a woman’s profession,” he says. “That racial disparity needs to be taken away.”

Coleman hopes that his book also opens up a dialogue among current male registered nurses. Empowering male RNs to continue to climb the ladder to leadership roles where they can influence change and serve as a new face of the nursing profession, he says, can encourage them to become the mentors male RNs need to help them succeed.

Another conversation that needs to occur in order to influence a culture shift is one between female nurses who may stereotype their male counterparts as only necessary for heavy lifting or things they “can’t” do.

“That’s a stereotype that hurts women and hurts the profession,” Coleman explains. “We don’t want nursing to be seen as a profession of the weak, we want it to be seen as a profession of the strong, because nurses are strong. We all need to do a better job of marketing ourselves--stop stereotyping and typecasting males and do more education in the hospital setting about gender diversity.”

Many men, after all, possess all the qualities required to be good nurses.

“Passion; someone with a tremendous amount of integrity; leadership skills; with a natural curiosity about the world; someone who is unafraid to take on issues that perhaps have challenged them in the past; someone who could treat someone at the end of the day how they want to be treated; and someone who cares to change the world we live in--those characteristics are essential and they transcend gender,” Coleman concludes. “Those are things I’d like to see in anyone who is interested in entering our noble profession.” 

© 2013. AMN Healthcare, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 

By: Darnell Lattal 

We’ve all heard it preached — in our corporations and beyond — how we should do the right things in the right way and for the right reasons. Even so, it’s often easier, faster and seems more profitable to take actions that fall in a somewhat gray area — what we’ll call a slippery slope.

Here’s what that could look like in an organizational setting: approving products before quality checks, production rate trumping safe practices, questionable sales made for goods not available, creative accounting to justify mergers, suppressing reporting errors, and the many other small ways we individually fail to keep promises or look away when our gut tells us something is amiss.

If one were to break it down by gender, there is no evidence that women are more likely to behave more ethically than men. But gender research does report more verbal sensitivity to the rights and dignity of others among women when compared to men. For instance, women overwhelmingly report that they would not work for a company that will do anything to win. Still, refusal to select such a workplace doesn’t mean that women in the workplace will behave more ethically than men. What people say they will do has very little predictive validity compared to what they actually do.

Nevertheless, gender is an untapped resource in setting the conditions to behave ethically. Consider the oft-cited stereotype that women are known for their inclination as caregivers and men for their conditioning to reach the end goal. Both are important. Caring is of little value if the corporation fails, and end goals are meaningless if people and the public good are harmed. But if each were to bring their strengths to the table when addressing ethical concerns and help keep each other accountable to do the right thing, we might not read about ethical lapses in the news as often.

So, who is in charge of the organizational ethical compass? The ultimate responsibility rests on the shoulders of those who lead, and diversity executives can help leaders to create an ethical workplace culture by starting with the following steps:

• Encourage leaders to surround themselves with men and women who are committed to supporting ethical actions.

• Make sure there’s a set of values that leaders and employees can look to when facing ethical dilemmas. Craft a sophisticated plan of action to ensure ethics is part of everything from sales meetings to production report to community involvement. Translate values into the varied observable actions that represent those values.

• Provide a forum in which errors and near-misses are reported without negative consequences, but are part of the healthy ethical framework the company is striving to create.

• Examine the consequences for saying and doing the wrong thing — subtle and unintended, overt and intended. Leaders must examine themselves and seek evaluative support from others about what they do that’s trending toward or away from what others deem ethical.

• Arrange practices, processes and incentives of the workplace to shape and maintain ethical decisions from the boardroom to the shop floor.

• Leaders should be open to critique of business strategies and tactics — in some instances it’s acknowledging that the worker in the boiler room may know better than leaders about what is really going on that is ethical or not.

• Encourage use of a scorecard of ethical elements to evaluate how well leaders and employees are doing, jot down what “slippery slopes” they faced and how they might better respond to it going forward.

• Share learning in an active way. Review short-term effects against uncertain but possible longer-term effects. Calibrate and change course where needed.

Source: Diversity Executive 

Are women more ethical than men? What do you think? Let us know with your comments below.

By TARA BANNOW

Male nurse Todd Ingram couldn't bring himself to finish the movie "Meet the Parents."

Source: KFOX14

Adrian Espinosa is part of a still extremely small but growing trend in nursing. He’s a man.

Espinosa, now a student at the University of San Francisco School of Nursing, said he quickly became aware that he is a man in a field that continues to be dominated by women.

“From the first day I started nursing school last year, as one of seven males in a class of 77, I realized that I would have to find my fit in a predominately female profession,” Espinosa said. His goal is to become a nurse practitioner “to fulfill a huge gap in primary care for under-represented populations.”

 In a 2012 essay written for the American Assembly for Men in Nursing Scholarship, Espinosa said his route to his chosen career was anything but direct.

“My journey into nursing wasn’t immediate, but my path was illuminated when I began working in community public health,” Espinosa wrote. “Watching nurses and nurse practitioners work with diverse populations inspired me to pursue the nursing culture in the hope of providing accessible care for marginalized communities.

 The nursing community knows it needs more people like Espinosa in its ranks and it is working hard to increasing nurse diversity.

According to the American Association of Colleges of Nursing, in 2008, there were 3,063,163 licensed registered nurses in the United States. Only 6.6% of those were men and 16.8% were non-Caucasian. Despite efforts from nursing schools across the nation to recruit and retain more men and minorities, the results have been fairly modest.  In 2010, approximately 11% of the students in BSN programs were men and 26.8% were a racial/ethnic minority.

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This is one reason why the University of Mary in Bismarck, ND prides itself on  providing "a nursing education for leadership and moral courage" and places an emphasis on diversity.

“U-Mary is a community of learners that recognizes and respects diversity and the richness it brings to the college experience,” according the catalog of the private, Catholic university that offers degree completion and advanced nursing degrees online and on campus.

University of Mary prides itself as “community that fosters diversity through hospitality and dialogue so as to learn to live in an interconnected world.”

Why are more men and people of color needed in today’s nursing ranks? To help meet the medical and personal needs of the United States’ increasingly diverse patient population that is adding varied ethnic, racial and cultural traditions to the country. Patient stories such as these from the University of California, San Francisco are good examples.

• Selena Martinez was diagnosed with Lynch Syndrome, a genetic disease that can lead to a wide-range of cancers. It wasn't until 2008 that the Martinez family, which in just 16 years had 13 cancer diagnoses among nine people, received a conclusive diagnosis of Lynch Syndrome.
• Simone Chou, was in her last year at the University of California, Berkeley when she learned she had lupus and that her immune system was attacking her kidneys. After nine years of treatment failed to slow the deterioration, Chou and her doctors launched a nationwide search to find a compatible kidney donor. They didn’t have far to look. Michael Wong, a college friend, stepped up. Wong, a practicing Buddhist, had read many stories about Buddhist saints who donated their body parts to other people. "When I first heard Simone talk about needing a kidney transplant, I remembered those stories."
• Doris Ward is one of the pioneering African-American politicians in the San Francisco Bay Area. She started her career as a trustee of the San Francisco Community College District, became a County Supervisor in 1980, President of the Board of Supervisors in 1990 and finally moved on to spend the last 10 years as the San Francisco County Assessor. She is also a breast cancer survivor. Ward now helps other African-American women through their own journey with cancer by sending them information and helping them understand their options.

“Nursing’s leaders recognize a strong connection between a culturally diverse nursing workforce and the ability to provide quality, culturally competent patient care,” according to a policy statement by the American Association of Colleges of Nursing.

 “Though nursing has made great strides in recruiting and graduating nurses that mirror the patient population, more must be done before adequate representation becomes a reality,” the association statement added.

The University of Mary is ready to help ensure that the nursing ranks reflect the diversity of our nation. For a welcoming environment, online or on campus, to get your advanced practice nursing degree, contact the University of Mary.