HACKENSACK, N.J.(KRT) – Shoulder to shoulder they stand, nine tough customers starring in a black-and-white ad.
One is a Harley rider, another a Navy Seal. A snowboarder is on one end, a basketball forward on the other.
“Are you man enough … to be a nurse?” the text asks.
The poster – for which the Oregon Center for Nursing, which created the ad, found licensed nurses with rough-and-gruff hobbies or backgrounds – was borne of the nationwide nursing shortage.
Staffing levels are 20 percent below the ideal, according to government labor reports. Experts say 126,000 nursing jobs could be filled right now – if only there were enough qualified candidates.
For anyone who asks, “Why go after men?” there is only one answer: “Why not?”
“Nurses are compensated well now,” said 26-year-old Jason Turi of Haledon, N.J., a former teacher who is studying for a baccalaureate in nursing at William Paterson University in Wayne, N.J. “There’s so many different roles – you’d be amazed.”
Danny Verina, 33, of West Milford, N.J., joined the same program after spending six years in the fitness industry.
“I found there were a lot more career opportunities in nursing,” Verina said. “You’re able to change departments. You can go from labor-and-delivery to clinical care to emergency room to gerontology.”
That men could bolster the nursing ranks is no new idea. The first known nursing school, opened about 250 B.C. in India, admitted only men. During the Crusades, monks and knights tended wounded soldiers.
During the U.S. Civil War, the recuperating sick or injured cared for new arrivals from the battlegrounds. By the late 19th century, however, the face of the profession started to change, as social attitudes steered women toward “nurturing” work such as teaching and healing.
Today just 5.4 percent of the country’s nurses are men, according to a survey released in February 2002 by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
It’s well-known that men in this field are the targets of mean-spirited stereotypes – being effeminate, underachieving and worse. A recent film aside – remember Robert De Niro berating Ben Stiller for his choice of career in “Meet the Parents”? – the cruelty is dissipating, nurses say.
Jerry Lucas, publisher of the fledgling Male Nurse Magazine, remembers the stigma in his early days of nursing school.
“If you’re a man and a nurse, you’re either a med-school dropout or gay,” Lucas recalled. “People just have a perception that we are doing what we shouldn’t be doing.”
An Army veteran and the married father of four girls, Lucas is a night-shift supervisor for the Medical Center of Southern Indiana. “I took a good look at the fact that I had been a nurse for 16 years, and there were no professional magazines showing what males were doing,” he says. “I pitched the idea of a magazine to the big publishers and they said it would never work. No one would ever buy it. I said OK, fine. I’ll do it myself.”
Male Nurse is set to make its debut this month.
“We’re going to run off 50,000 (copies),” he says. “I already have 6,000 subscriptions, and no one’s even seen the magazine yet.”
Thanks in part to recruitment efforts like the “Are you man enough … ?” poster, the audience for such a magazine is growing. In effect, the industry is beckoning to an overlooked pool of job candidates and saying: We need you, yes, but more important, we want you.
“If you look at the roots of this profession, we really evolved out of that `40s model of being a doctor’s helper,” says Deborah Burton, executive director of the Oregon Center for Nursing. “Men were treated terribly or made to feel there’s something wrong with them. It hasn’t been until the last 15 years or so that we’ve talked about it being a problem. We’re changing a very sick and inaccurate image as we go after men.”
Johnson & Johnson, the New Brunswick, N.J.-based health care products company, started addressing the nursing shortage in March 2002 with a $20 million print and video advertising campaign that prominently featured men in the profession. Of 70 or so nurses profiled on its Web site, about a third are males.
Nationally, the median base pay for registered nurses is $41,642, according to a survey by Allied Physicians.
“You don’t have to work a Monday-to-Friday day-hour shift,” Patricia Brady, a nursing recruiter for Hackensack University Medical Center, said. “As your career evolves, you may start as a staff nurse. Ten to 15 years from now, you may want to go into another kind of nursing. We’re really facing a shortage. It’s one of the fields where you don’t have to worry about finding a job.”
Turi, who was a middle school teacher in Paterson, N.J., for three years, says he’s surprised by his level of interest in his new studies, even as he admits to the emotional and financial strain of returning to school.
“I was about to be tenured. When you get tenure, that’s pretty much it – you get very comfortable and locked in,” he says. “Before I got locked in, I got out. I have friends who are teachers asking, `What are the prerequisites? I’m interested.’ “
(c) 2003, The Record (Bergen County, N.J.)

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