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Credit: Roy Groething
Nursing student Carl Nelson, left, with
Assistant Professor Robert L. Atkins.
Nelson was in his 50s when he decided to
sell the bakery he owned to become a
nurse; Atkins is one of two full-time
male faculty members at the College of
Nursing in Newark.
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When Robert Atkins was working toward his nursing degree in the early 1990s, his friends and relatives often asked him why he didn’t just go to medical school and become a doctor instead. “That drove me crazy,” Atkins says. “I’d say, ‘No, I really like being a nurse.’ Even patients would want to call me doctor, not nurse, like calling me a nurse would be an insult.”
Despite the bemused comments and befuddled patients, Atkins stuck to his decision to become a nurse and is now one of two full-time male faculty members at the College of Nursing in Newark. Although nursing is still a predominantly female profession, more men are enrolling in nursing schools and Atkins hopes he can be a role model for men considering a nursing career.
“I think it’s good for nursing to have more men in it,” Atkins says. “Guys tend to rule it out, but I think they would love it. It’s such a satisfying career.”
Indeed, more men seem to be realizing not only the satisfactions a nursing career can provide but the opportunities the profession can bring. At the College of Nursing, about 10 percent of each graduating class of about 100 students is male, says Jennifer Esposito, coordinator of recruitment for the college. (Nationally, about 6 percent of nurses are men.) Esposito says she makes no specific overtures to recruit men to the program but has seen an increase in the number of men interested in the program in just the past year.
“Men are seeing they can have a great career in medicine without all the burden of going to medical school,” Esposito says. In addition, salaries for nurses continue to rise and the ongoing shortage of nurses means job security is high. Esposito adds that 100 percent of the college’s graduates have jobs upon receiving their degrees.
Mary Greipp, chair of the nursing program in Camden, says that, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the current nursing shortage is likely to last 30 to 40 years. “People are asking, ‘Where is there stability, where can I find a place for myself?’ I’m interviewing more and more men all the time. I haven’t seen a dramatic shift, but we have had more males coming into the program than in prior years. I truly think it’s related to the economy.”
Greipp says the Camden program also does not make any special efforts to recruit men to the program. While only two men will graduate in the spring of 2006, the current freshman class has seven or eight men enrolled, Greipp notes.
Felissa Lashley, dean of the College of Nursing in Newark, says that while more men are becoming nurses, she thinks there is still a stigma holding many of them back. She says that about 15 years ago, she and a colleague did a study of high school students’ perceptions of nursing as a career for men. Most of the male students said they thought their fathers and peers would not approve of such a career and that others might think they were gay. It was perceived by them as problematic although it should have not been so. “Attitudes have a changed a little but not as much as one would like,” Lashley says. “I’d like to redo that study with the same ages and see what we would find now.”
Anecdotally, though, discrimination against male nurses seems to be waning, Lashley adds. “I don’t hear as much about discrimination as I did even 10 years ago,” Lashley says. “There will always be individual biases, but I don’t think there’s bias as a group” against men in nursing. Greipp agrees, adding that she doesn’t hear complaints of discrimination from men in the Camden nursing program. She notes that the president of the campus nursing student association last year was a man and that one of the officers this year is a man. “I think the men are welcomed with open arms. If discrimination happens, I think it’s a real peculiarity,” she adds.
Steve Martin is one of the two men who will graduate next spring from Camden. He has worked in the health care field for several years, first as an emergency medical technician and pharmacy technician, and currently as a respiratory therapist. After graduating, he hopes to work as a nurse anesthetist, which will require two years of critical care nursing experience and a master’s degree. Martin says he enjoys nursing because “there is so much to learn in it. You can change your career every five years and there are so many different areas you can work in.”
Jeremy Rachel, a senior at the College of Nursing in Newark who is taking classes in New Brunswick, also came to nursing after serving as an EMT. He has worked as a nurse at St. Peter’s and Robert Wood Johnson hospitals, and is now working at a nursing home in Somerset. Most patients he has worked with, he says, react positively to having a male nurse.
Rachel says he has never felt discriminated against as a male nurse and that it doesn’t bother him when his female counterparts need help lifting a heavy patient or dealing with a combative psychiatric patient. “We each bring different things to nursing. I have no problem jumping in there and helping. That’s what makes things work,” he adds.
Carl Nelson, a Newark nursing student who also will graduate next spring, was in his 50s when he decided to sell the bakery he owned and become a nurse like his wife. He was more nervous that his age would be a factor in nursing school than his gender but neither were a problem. “Everybody treats me as an equal,” he says. He adds that while he thinks more men are interested in nursing because of the good pay and job opportunities, he hopes they realize that “it’s a very difficult job. You can’t be in it just for the paycheck.”
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