The good news is that the percentage of male nurses has doubled in the past two decades. The bad news is that men in the profession still only represent less than 6 percent of all nurses.
It's not from a lack of trying. From male-nurse calendars to magazine advertising campaigns in publications such as Sports Illustrated, recruitment methods are raising awareness.
Tom Badger, RN, BSN, was a Navy nurse and recruiter for 24 years before entering civilian life. Today, he works at the Atlanta Veterans Affairs Medical Center in health care recruiting.
Badger sees several reasons for the lack of men in nursing.
"Nursing simply hasn't been marketed as an accepted male profession," he said. "Also, the pool of men to come into nursing from the military has decreased since it became an all-volunteer force."
Badger should know. He served as a staff nurse at the Naval Hospital in Orlando, Fla., in the late 1970s. At that time, the male nurse population represented almost 30 percent of all nurses. Many had been medics or corpsmen during the Vietnam War. When they returned home, they became RNs.
Kevin McHugh, RN, BSN, is a former drill sergeant who spent time as a medic in the Army. When he left the military in 1996 after 20 years of active duty, he headed to nursing school.
"Where else can you work with 94 percent women?" he said with a laugh. "It was one job that I had the ability to do, I knew I would never worry about job security and I would have a diverse choice of careers."
McHugh said a background in medicine is not a prerequisite for becoming a nurse. His male neighbors frequently ask him about going into nursing.
"They know about the current nursing shortage and see the potential for job security," he said. "Anyone can go into the field; that's what nursing school is for — to provide the right training."
New program
McHugh is the director of nursing at North Metro Technical College in Acworth. He was hired in 2002 to build the nursing program there; the first classes in the program begin this month.
The program's first class of 30 students is from the nurse technician program at North Metro Tech. The 28 women and two men will graduate with the ability to test for their practical nursing licenses in December 2004, having already fulfilled many of the core requirements in the nurse technician program.
McHugh and fellow instructor Larry Hannigan are the only two instructors in the LPN program there.
"I taught in the Army and I love to teach," McHugh said. "Women used to be pigeonholed into three areas — teaching, nursing and housewives. That's changed now and more women are choosing other professions, so we've lost a block of women to be nurses.
"We have to actively recruit men to become nurses to help fill the void."
DeKalb Medical Center cooked up an idea last year aimed at recruiting more male nurses. The organization's Male Nurse Calendar featured 12 nurses; it's used in middle schools and high schools as a recruitment tool.
"We've been really surprised by the success of the calendar," said Patricia A. Horton, RN, BSN, MN, MBA, CNAA and director of critical care and emergency services at DeKalb Medical Center, where 13 percent of the nurses are men.
Horton said she stole the idea from a poster she saw from the Oregon Center for Nursing, an organization working to combat the nursing shortage in that state. It asks, "Are you man enough to be a nurse?" The poster was also part of a campaign that included advertising in Sports Illustrated.
The topic is becoming more visible in the profession, with national nursing publications taking up the cause along with hospitals and nursing schools. Kennesaw State University has men in the top two positions at its college of nursing. Men in the field are rallying as well.
"The wide choices of specialties and the great opportunities in the field, plus the job security, all are reasons more men should choose nursing," McHugh said. "There's no other job like it in the world."