Admiral nurse who was ex-banker says: 'Nursing profession needs to diversify'

A senior male nurse at a care home group spoke to carehome.co.uk about his experience of becoming a nurse in a female dominated profession.

Adam Smith works as a senior Admiral nurse across all the homes in the Colten Care Group and says even though he hasn’t experienced prejudice or negativity from colleagues or patients, he feels the nursing profession in this country "needs to diversify".

The nurse says men are wrongly perceived to not be as caring as women and the female-orientated lexicon of nursing is off-putting for men considering the profession as a career.

He says: “Florence Nightingale, for example, once said that men had ‘rough hands’ ; that they don’t appreciate ‘touch’ or how we should hold somebody. But actually men can be as equally caring.”

‘At mobile breast cancer screening unit, I wasn’t even allowed in waiting room’

Nursing is a family friendly job, according to Mr Smith, who says: "If you have family it is much more flexible than say a job in IT, and you can job share with your partner to fit around your family."

But statistics show men are still reluctant to enter the profession.

According to the Royal College Nursing (RCN), nursing remains one of the most ‘gender segregated’ professions in the UK with only 74,580 out of 690,000 registered nurses being male.

Obviously, with half of the population being cared for being male, there is a good argument for more men to be working in the nursing profession, and there is evidence to suggest some older men seem to relate better to nursing care being administered by another male.

Also having more men enter into the nursing profession could be a way of dealing with the staffing issues it faces.

However, Mr Smith explains that certain attitudes towards men in nursing prevail, even from the student stage.

He says: “I remember the first bit of coursework I had to do as a student. A small group of us had to do a piece on health promotion. My small group decided to visit a mobile breast cancer screening unit, and I remember there was four of us, and I wasn’t even allowed in the waiting room.”

Further to this, Mr Smith was told in no uncertain terms there were females in the waiting room and that “they wouldn’t appreciate a man coming in”.

Sisters and Matrons: Nursing jobs still advertised with female titles

One of the main reasons Mr Smith thinks less men go into care and nursing in the UK, is the misplaced perception that generally speaking, women are traditionally better at ‘caring’ and ‘nurturing’ than men.

The strong history of nursing in the UK has a female slant, and still uses a female lexicon.

The senior nurse explained how he’d looked online for nursing jobs and "there were still hundreds of nursing jobs being offered with the title ‘sister’ or ‘matron’.”

He says: “I’m very proud of being a nurse and proud of our history, but I think we now need to diversify from an employment point of view.”

But the idea of what constitutes a nursing and caring professional in this country is so instilled in us, even Mr Smith found himself questioning the concept of a male midwife when his wife was expecting.

He adds: “One of the most incredible males I’ve ever met in healthcare is actually a midwife, but I’ll be very honest, I struggled with it to begin with, even though I’m a male nurse.”

Mental health nursing: ‘historically asylums had attendants that would have been men’

Mr Smith is very quick to point out that good patient care is first and foremost about personal choice rather than a male versus female nursing argument, and he says: “I can probably count on one hand, in my entire nursing career, the amount of times a woman has said to me, ‘actually I hope you don’t mind, but I would prefer a female nurse’.”

One traditional route into nursing for men is through mental health, which is the way Mr Smith entered the profession. He explains this specialist area has always been more male orientated than other nursing roles.

Mr Smith hadn’t originally intended to become a nurse, but he was always fascinated by how the mind works, psychology, and mental health.

He says: “Starting my course, I was one of very few men. I was mental health trained, where you do get a lot more men, and if you do look more historically, asylums and institutions had attendants that would have been men.”

Previously, he had worked in other more traditionally ‘male’ work environments but wasn’t satisfied. He explained: “I existed in a completely different world having worked in banking, and before that I worked on an apprenticeship within a huge engineering firm. My family, peers, friends and teachers – these were the lines they pushed you down.”

The Admiral nurse hasn’t generally felt that being male and being a nurse has caused him too many problems but says he does identify with the more familiar face of gender segregation in the workplace, where women struggle to gain a foothold in certain male dominated professions, especially at a senior level.

He says: “We often talk about equality and diversity at work and we talk about women not becoming leaders or women not being on executive boards, or directors in companies, but actually as a man in a very, very female dominated environment, I often connect with that.”

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