Southern Vermont College

As we reflect on the healthcare situation in America, it is clear that there is and will continue to be a nursing shortage.  While the precise estimates vary depending on the source, there will clearly be hundreds of thousands of unfilled nursing positions in hospitals and nursing homes in the coming decades.  President Obama has specifically noted the crisis and has expressed “alarm.”

The reasons for the shortages are complex.  They include the following: There is a capacity problem within nursing schools.  There are too few nursing faculty.  Nursing programs are expensive to run.  There are shortages in clinical opportunities needed for accreditation.  Many of the current nurses are approaching their retirement years.  Many nurses move out of direct care delivery into management positions within hospitals or other healthcare facilities.

These shortages put patients at risk, and as a nation, we need to be deliberate in expanding our nursing programs to enable more students to enter this critical field.  At Southern Vermont College, we are doing just that. We are expanding our nursing programs — enabling a greater number of prospective nurses to enter them.

We are accomplishing this in several ways.

We are growing our faculty.  We are increasing our clinical sites.  We just opened a modern Simulation Laboratory that enhances learning and expands clinic-like opportunities. (More on that in a later blog post, as it is an amazing facility that has simulation patients, videotaping capacity with a student feedback opportunity, a faculty-viewing booth with a two-way mirror.)  We are exploring other ways to enlarge our nursing program even further in the coming months. This is all exciting and important work, and we are deeply committed to offering nursing opportunities (and pre-nursing education) to a growing cohort of students from all across the United States and abroad.

In addition to the just described overall nursing shortage, I want to focus here on another type of shortage: the number of male nurses and male nursing students.

The data tell the story.  Male nurses comprise approximately 7% of all nurses.  (The statistics for minority nurses present an even more stark reality but I save that for another blog entry.)  Currently, surveys show that males comprise only approximately 10% of the number of bachelor degree nursing students and 13.9% of the associate degree programs.

A partial solution to the overall shortage problem is to identify and encourage a wider range of students to become nurses – and that includes welcoming more male nursing students into the profession.  Here is another way in which SVC is helping – we have a robust and growing number of male nursing students. Of our total pool of nursing students, 15.5% are male and of our pre-nursing students, 16.3% are male! We are above national norms in both categories. And, we can do even better.

SVC Nursing graduate Mike Colgan of Connecticut speaks at the 2009 Nurses Pinning Ceremony.

We hope our current male nursing students will help us recruit more male nursing students. We are planning more targeted outreach to male nursing students. We have one male nursing faculty member at present, and we are hoping to identify other male faculty candidates. We are looking at specific ways to help our male nursing students deal with the mistaken stereotypes of male nurses, including that men are less caring than their female counterparts.  Our Simulation Laboratory will provide important opportunities to observe male and female students working together with patients, enabling us to assess and remediate any stereotyping or gender-specific behavior.

As is true in any field, we need to strive for gender balance. Male nursing students and male nurses are important additions to quality healthcare delivery.  Some patients may prefer male nurses, particularly for more intimate, gender specific procedures.  For those of us who believe that there are differences in male and female communication styles and problem-solving approaches, adding male nursing students enriches the classroom and provides important perspectives on critical thinking skills in the clinical setting.

So, it is with extraordinary pleasure that I reflect on our growing cohort of male nursing students.

I do have two hopes:

First, I hope there will come a time in the not-too-distant future when, at least on the Southern Vermont College campus, we can refer to our nursing students without cross-referencing their gender. We are not there yet but, as has occurred in many other fields that were once deeply gendered, it is goal to which we can aspire.

Second, I hope that our commitment to growing our nursing program and deliberating seeking to add underrepresented groups into the healthcare profession will improve healthcare delivery to many patients.  It is a commitment of which we can be proud and which can have an almost immediate impact.  It can help even as the debate on healthcare reform rages on and on.