What can educators do to attract more men to the nursing field?
By Deborah Jeanne Sergeant
During the pandemic, 20% of medical personnel left the healthcare industry, including nurses.
Interestingly, the number of males working in nursing has grown since then.
According to statistics published in the 2022 National Nursing Workforce Survey in the Journal of Nursing Regulation, the current percent of men in nursing grew from 9.4% to 11.2% between 2020 and 2022.
One of these men is Michael Casey, registered nurse at Center for Children’s Cancer and Blood Disorders at Upstate Cancer Center.
He had always felt interest in medical careers and helping people. While in high school, he began working at Wegmans Pharmacy as a technician and upon graduation, he enrolled at Le Moyne in a biology program.
“I wasn’t sure which path in the medical field I wanted to go with,” he recalled. “I thought about becoming a doctor and working with pediatric oncology patients because this is a specialized field that has always connected with me deeply.”
About halfway through his bachelor’s program, he realized that his educational path didn’t connect with a career he wanted. He began looking into working as a pharmacist because of his past familiarity with that type of work and because he enjoyed it. His boss’s wife, Sarabeth Wojnowicz, lead pediatric oncology pharmacist at Upstate, invited him to shadow her so he could learn what it’s like working as a pharmacist at a hospital.
“This experience would turn out to be the best experience of my life and one that would set my path moving forward, but not for the reason I was expecting,” Casey said.
While shadowing Wojnowicz, he realized that nursing was “the perfect fit,” he said, because of meeting the compassionate nurses there. He immediately changed his plans and enrolled at the Pomeroy College of Nursing at Crouse Hospital.
Some of his early career male mentors helped him learn how to deal with occasional negative comments patients offer male nurses.
“These types of negative comments come and go over the years, but I would say there has been a massive shift both within the medical field and among the general population,” Casey said. “It doesn’t seem to be as much of a topic now when I tell people that I am a nurse whereas a few years ago I always heard, ‘Oh, good for you being a male nurse,’ as if we are different than any other nurse. We don’t care for patients or families any differently because of our gender.
“A person’s gender does not define their capacity to love or care for other human beings and I feel that the medical field, specifically the culture here at Upstate, has done a good job at reflecting that when it comes to men in nursing.”
For Jeremy Donohue, registered nurse in emergency medicine at Oswego Health, working as an EMT and combat medic in the military primed him to want to enter nursing. He studied at both Le Moyne and at St. Joseph’s before completing his associate degree. Donohue is currently working on his bachelor’s in nursing while still serving in the National Guard and working as a nurse. Donohue anticipates completing his BSN by the end of this summer.
It seems that the adrenaline rush of some areas of nursing tend to attract men more.
“I work in the ER and you see more men in the ICU and ER than in other nursing fields in general,” Donohue said. “We’re still a minority but I feel like there’s a good presence of men in nursing. It is starting to grow.”
He thinks that men began making inroads in nursing at the end of the Vietnam and Korean wars, when veterans who had served as medics decided like Donohue to segue into nursing as their civilian career.
He also thinks that the science aspects of nursing, leadership opportunities and technical aspects “maybe appeals to a lot of men.”
Donohue said that occasionally older patients say they would prefer a female nurse to perform certain tasks. However some patients would prefer a male nurse. He’s not offended when patients state a preference, as it’s their right.
Donohue advises anyone interested in nursing to contact a hospital or health system to ask about shadowing nurses to learn more about it.
“There are many difference things a nurse can do,” he said. “If you shadow on a med-surg floor and don’t like it, there are so many different things you can do as a nurse. Get your foot in the door and see what you like for the first part of your career.
“Right now, male nurses are in a great spot and nursing is in huge demand. Men are just as capable and compassionate as females. If you’re a man looking for a career or looking to switch up, I’d recommend nursing to anybody.”