ECU hopes to remedy low number of nurses
September 03,2005
K.J. Williams
Sun Journal
GREENVILLE - Strategies to steer male military nurses leaving the Navy and Air Force toward the civilian nursing sector will be studied by East Carolina University.
Phil Julian, a nursing instructor at ECU and a former Navy corpsman and Air Force nurse, is heading the study, with the pledged cooperation of representatives from Naval hospitals at Cherry Point and Camp Lejeune and the Air Force clinic at Seymour Johnson in Goldsboro.
Among civilian nurses, about 6 percent are men, compared to an average of 30 percent in the armed forces, said Julian. In addition, about 60 percent of the military's corpsmen and orderlies are men.
He said at the Naval hospitals at Cherry Point and Camp Lejeune, men comprise about one-third of the nursing staff and more than half the number of corpsmen. At Seymour Johnson, only two of the nurses are men and almost half of the corpsmen are male.
However, there's no significant influx of male nurses who leave the military joining the medical profession as civilians, Julian said.
He plans to organize focus groups at the military hospitals and the clinic to find out what can be done to recruit qualified nurses to teach nursing. With more faculty, ECU could train more nurses, he said.
"From ECU's point of view, it's going to help establish a better relationship with a huge applicant pool," said Julian, a clinical assistant professor.
The study will delve into the reasons some male nurses, corpsmen and orderlies choose to leave the medical field when they leave the military.
Julian said he wants to know what the barriers are for these men in terms of medical careers and what incentives would encourage them to stay in the field, or further their education to become nursing faculty.
"Men are more underrepresented than African-Americans in the profession," he said. "Basically, there's 50 percent of the population that we're not recruiting very well."
Julian hopes to start the focus groups next month.
