By Tammie Smith
Daily Press
Richmond, Va. — The vast majority of nurses are women, but don’t tell “the guys on five” at a Richmond hospital.
They call them the “guys on five,” the four men who work in the orthopedic and surgical-care unit on the fifth floor of CJW Medical Center’s Chippenham campus.
Their names are Steve Hutchinson, John Shell, Mark Edmunds and Morgan Messner. They are registered nurses -- men in a profession where women are more than 90 percent of those practicing.
“It’s the best thing I have ever done in my life,” said Shell, 42, a registered nurse for 15 years. “You get to help people. ... Inside of me, I am a caregiver,” a trait he feels he inherited from his mother, a licensed practical nurse for 46 years.
Edmunds, 31, a registered nurse for 10 years, was attracted to nursing’s flexibility and opportunity.
“The money is decent,” Edmunds said. “You can pretty much set your hours. Working holidays and things like that are not great. I tell people, ‘Where else can you wear pajamas to work?’”
As those in health care look for ways to offset a projected nursing shortage that could leave many hospital bedsides uncovered, men, who make up half the population, are a natural place to look.
But change is slow. While the number of men in nursing is increasing, it is growing slowly. According to a 2004 federal sample survey of nurses, men are an estimated 5.8 percent of the 2.9 million registered nurses in the United States.
Many still consider nursing “women’s work.”
Historically, men have made up larger percentages of nurses in the military. For some, military service is where they first began to consider nursing.
“I was a medic in the Navy,” said Hutchinson, who has been a nurse for 35 years. “That is exactly what got me into it.”
Others come by way of other health care fields.
Michael Fajohn, 32, a registered nurse at Memorial Regional Medical Center, is a former firefighter and paramedic. He enrolled in nursing school in 2003 after feeling he had “hit a ceiling” in his career.
“Pre-hospital, paramedic is pretty much the highest there is,” Fajohn said. “I knew there was more out there. The nature of the job, we spend a lot of time in the hospital. We get to know a lot of the emergency room staff and nurses. Just talking with them, I found it offered a lot of things I was looking for in a career.”
Nursing also seemed a natural next step for paramedic Jerry Bliley, 40.
“Being a paramedic takes a greater toll on your body, the environment you work in takes a toll on you,” Bliley said. He recently completed his first year in the nursing program at J. Sargeant Reynolds Community College and eventually sees himself working in pediatrics or the emergency room.
Male nurses bring a different vibe to the environment, said Susan McClelland, nursing director for the unit where the “guys on five” work.
“When you have a lot of women working together, the men in the mix have a totally different attitude about things,” McClelland said.
They also are the heavy lifters -- literally -- called on to help lift, move and turn patients.
“I am a pretty big guy,” said Shell, who used to powerlift and is a former semiprofessional football player. “I have been called on every floor in the hospitals” to help lift patients.
Patients sometimes mistake them for doctors. And there are patients who, for some procedures, don’t want a male nurse.
“It’s more for personal treatments or procedures,” Fajohn said. “They just feel more comfortable with a woman.”
As with women, men in nursing rank job flexibility and job security as two of the biggest benefits.
Edmunds, father of a 22-month-old with another baby on the way, is married to a nurse, and they have arranged their schedules so they don’t need outside child care. Bliley, whose children are 8 and 10, is married to a nurse, as is Roland Anderson, 53, a registered nurse in the neuroscience intensive care unit at VCU Medical Center. For families, there is less risk of losing career gains when taking time off for family, Anderson said.
“You can come and go in the field, and you don’t lose out,” Anderson said. “As a nurse, you can work a day a week and still work in intensive care and then come right back in, pick up full time and not miss a beat.”
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