We have all seen the figures -- more young people are ignoring nursing as a career and entering fields that are perceived to be more exciting, glamorous or lucrative.
My colleagues and I at Cedar Crest College have enlisted our students to brainstorm ways to reverse this trend. Each nursing major is required to take the four-credit course, "Leadership in Nursing." In class we ask our students to find individual solutions to the problem and put them into practice. Students are not only developing programs and initiatives that will help relieve the shortage, but also discovering new things about the nursing profession and themselves.
Just ask Brenda Keller, RN, BS, a 2000 graduate. Now a critical-care nurse, Keller designed an outreach project for local youth organizations, creating a "What's My Line?" inspired game to help young people reevaluate their images of nursing.
Keller asked the youths four questions about nurses -- touching on areas of educational background, training, personality characteristics and financial compensation. After they shared their answers, Keller showed the youths photos -- without letting them know each photo depicted a nurse. She asked her audience to identify the careers of the individuals in the photos.
"None of the students got the professions right," Keller says. "They still have stereotyped nurses as women dressed in white, with white caps, working in hospitals. This exercise helps to break that stereotype down."
Alison Bocis, a senior at Cedar Crest, is putting the final touches on her initiative. After wading through piles of nursing recruitment brochures, Bocis realized there was a problem -- most of the brochures were not very interesting and were too copy-heavy.
She began to work with administrators at Good Shepherd Rehabilitation Hospital to develop a user-friendly brochure aimed specifically at recruiting high school students into nursing.
"We're taking steps to make the new brochure bold and exciting," Bocis says. "We're also adding pictures that represent the growing diversity in the field of nursing."
Bocis will take the brochure to Houston, where she will work as a shock trauma ICU nurse. "We want kids to know there is a lot of flexibility in the nursing field -- nurses can work with children and the elderly, work in trauma and critical care or for a private practice -- the possibilities are endless," she says.
Mary Horton, a recent grad working as a school nurse and as an RN at Easton Hospital, reached out to schools by lobbying guidance counselors to reexamine nursing as a viable career for their students.
"I met with the counselor at my own high school who said he was actually dissuading students from pursuing a nursing career," she recalls.
After persuading the counselor that nurses were a necessity, Horton developed a presentation to take into the classroom -- showing students at all age levels who nurses are and what they do.
"The kids love to try out the stethoscopes and other equipment, take each other's blood pressure -- it's a wonderful hands-on experience for them," she reports. "Many of them wrote us letters saying they wanted to be nurses."
Robert Pencil and Susanne Lane took the opposite approach -- they brought the students into the nursing classroom on Cedar Crest's campus. Pencil, who is now working in a critical-care internship says, "Most of them hadn't considered becoming a nurse -- certainly not an OR, ER or a med/surg nurse -- because they thought of nurses as only someone who helps a patient at the bedside. They didn't see all the other opportunities."
Pencil and Lane gave the students a tour of the nursing lab and spoke to them about nursing careers. They provided students with exercises and experiments, giving them experience with some clinical procedures.
"They were impressed by the starting salaries in nursing and were encouraged that you can be in the medical field on this level and really make a difference," he says.
Having an Impact
Keller thinks so. "I've seen young people change their mind about nursing. Few of them had any idea about the possibilities and opportunities there are in nursing before we met with them."
"I spoke with a nurse who entered the field more than 25 years ago, and he has outreach programs. Students have come to him years later to say he was the reason they entered nursing. I'm sure there are young people who are considering a nursing career because of our projects. I'm just now learning about the impact that I can have by presenting positive role models to kids."
This article originally appeared on Monster.com.
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