Anchor Intro:
From a recent episode of the T.V. series Scrubs to the popular Ben Stiller movie Meet the Parents, male nurses have been on the receiving end of countless jokes and innuendos. So what is it really like to be a man in the nursing profession? And despite Missouri's nursing shortage, why do some men feel they are being ignored? KBIA's Aaron Kessler finds out.
Script:
Gordon Rogers has been an emergency room nurse at University Hospital in Columbia for close to 30 years, and says one question keeps coming up.
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"I have had a lot of patients ask me 'so are you studying to become a doctor?'"
What's more, Rogers says it wasn't just his patients doing the asking.
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"One of those people for a long time was my mother. It took her a while to get over the idea that no, I wasn't going to 'graduate up' and become a doctor. That I was happy doing what I was doing."
In an era increasingly saturated with calls for rights - women's rights, gay rights, the rights of the handicapped, to name a few - there is one group of Americans that seems to be left out of such protections. That group, some say, is men.
Of course, many find it hard to sympathize with or even imagine men at the short end of the stick. After all, they did hold the power for most of human history, and many ways, they still do. So who's going to cry a tear for wronged men? Humor or even ridicule aimed in the male direction is regarded as natural, harmless, safe&ldots;while a similar joke about women or a minority group would provoke a firestorm of outrage. But then come on, they are men, right? What's the harm?
But there is one specific group of men who represent the flip-side of the historical equation - they are male nurses.
While most professions are dominated by men, in nursing it's women who run the show, women who make the rules, and who set the agenda. Of the more than 2 million registered nurses in the United States, only about 5 percent are men. And in many ways, male nurses face the same discrimination issues as women do in other workplaces.
But just how such discrimination takes shape depends on who you ask. Jerry Lucas is an emergency room nurse and publisher of Male Nurse Magazine. He says men contact him from all over the country with horror stories. In some cases, the problems sound like something right out of the civil rights era.
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"One gentleman, for his clinical and OB rotation, instead of being able to change in the locker room, which there was none for him, he had to change in a bathroom no bigger than a walk-in closet, because there was no place for him to change into scrubs, as there was for the female nurses on that floor."
While those kinds of problems are more rare, the bigger issue may be the perception of male nurses, both by the public, and by the patients' themselves. With the nursing profession so dominated by women, many can't help but wonder why a man would want to get into it. Lucas says that leads to unfair stereotypes.
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"Our problem is that that's the perception, this is a feminine thing, that you can't be a nurse unless you're feely-touchy. That's just the promulgation that goes on there&ldots;.It's not feely-touchy anymore. It's taking care of patients the way you would take care of your family."
But Rogers, whose mother did eventually stop nagging him to become a doctor, thinks those stereotypes are already becoming a thing of the past -- at least within the hospitals themselves.
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"I really think it's fast disappearing. There are more male nurses than ever. I think within the hospital culture, male nurses are quite accepted. It may be still new to some people who haven't been in a hospital in a while, but in the hospital, there's no one who hasn't worked with a male nurse, with several male nurses."
He says he used to be greeted with a blank stare when he walked into a patient's room. That doesn't happen anymore.
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"I can remember years ago, I would introduce myself and say 'I'm Gordon, I'll be your nurse' and they would say 'Oh, a male nurse.' I don't get that comment back very often. It's understood that yes there are male nurses and nobody is surprised when a man walks in and says he's going to be their nurse."
But Lucas says some patients are still surprised when a man walks in the room. And when that happens, the result can be embarrassing - and even dangerous.
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"I had a lady come in one night who was probably having a heart attack. In that setting we have a lot to do in a short amount of time. And we get her undressed so that we could hook her up to her monitors and everything -- and then she requested that we turn our backs. I said 'ma'am please get undressed so we can get you on this monitor' because there were only two nurses there and we were both males. But until we turned our backs, this lady would not undress - even though she was dying of a heart attack!"
Lucas thinks the problem is rooted in our very ideas about gender roles. He says particularly when it comes to more intimate procedures, such as inserting a catheter, many people still get uneasy.
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"You would not think nothing to bring your girlfriend, wife, or daughter into the emergency room and have a female cath her. You wouldn't not think nothing about a female cathing you in the ER. But you would think twice about me coming in there and having to cath your daughter. Or your wife showing me her breast in the emergency room, because I'm a male. Why is that?"
With Missouri and other states facing a critical shortage of nurses, it seems nobody is bothering to find out. Lucas sees the problem starting at the source - at nursing schools themselves. He says most schools simply aren't interested in bringing more in more men.
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"Look on the internet, or go to your local college, and tell me how many male faces you see staring back at you on those brochures. You will find very, very few."
Indeed, the website of the University of Missouri's Sinclair School of Nursing features dozens of photographs. Only three of them contain male nurses. Of course, if the school's faculty is an indication, gender diversity is not a top priority. Of the 51 registered nurses on the faculty, none are male. In fact the only man on the faculty researcher with a PhD - not a nurse.
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"I think the guys have been ignored."
Alice Kuehn is one of those 51 nurses, and admits there's a problem.
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"They are beginning to make the inroads, as long as the recruitment media portray - and has male nurses in these portrayals - doing very intelligent, decision making, forward thinking activities."
Whether that is actually happening remains unclear. Like most nursing schools around the country, Kuehn says there is little effort being made by the university to target men specifically for recruitment.
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"Well we certainly don't discourage it. You know, we have pictures of fellas in nursing. What I'm saying is that there isn't an intense program right now where we're actively saying 'okay, let's get more men in there.'"
But with the nursing shortage growing ever more critical, many are left wondering why more efforts aren't being made to reach out to men.
Kuehn thinks the real problem is the perception of nursing as a whole - not just for men. And not just by the public. She says within the medical profession itself, nurses rarely get the respect they deserve.
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"They have no control over their practice. They are at the total mercy of the administrators, and they really get so frustrated that when they make decisions they are countermanded. They are sometimes treated as second-class citizens by physicians or administrators."
Nurses are too often regarded as the handmaiden of the doctor, or the doctor's helper, rather than having a whole separate role. She thinks the more nurses become accepted as peers, rather than servants -- the more they are allowed to make decisions along with doctors rather than for them -- the more students will flock to nursing. And, Kuehn thinks, more men will be interested in nursing, if they see they'll get to make decisions.
What that requires first though, though, is better advertising. On that point, everyone seems to agree.
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"The way that this nursing shortage is going to be curbed is one nurse at a time. We have 2,189,000 registered nurses. Whether you say female or male does not matter to me. I want to see more males in the profession, but we have to go out and recruit. If we can't get nurses to do that, then we're doomed."
One company has taken matters into its own hands. The Johnson and Johnson corporation has begun running television ads across the country, including mid-Missouri, promoting nursing as a career. Their slogan? "Dare to Care." And featured in several of the ads? Men.
This is Aaron Kessler, KBIA News.
