Why are most nurses female?

I started my midwifery training in 1978 and it was in the news that a London hospital had taken on 3 Male midwife students. My son had complex medical needs and his one to one went on to do his nursing training, I did suggest he might like midwifery, he was appalled

Caleo Sat 24-Jul-21 11:42:45
MawBe, intellectual work is nearly always higher social status than manual work. Nurses are not and never have been expected to be as intellectual as doctors

Where did I ever suggest what you dispute?
It was that women were not deemed the intellectual equals of men

Mawbe, I am sorry to have seemed to dispute when I do in fact agree with you :

"It was that women were not deemed the intellectual equals of men"
I think what I intended was to enlarge on a point of view which interests me. I think what I can do in future is never to omit from my reply 'I agree' when I do agree.

My dad was a nurse in the 1940s. That was where he met my mum. When they married he retuned to his engineering job as the pay for nursing wasn’t sufficient for the breadwinner when they started a family. He always looked back fondly on his nursing days and it would have remained his long term career if it wasn’t so poorly paid.

Back then the male nurses only worked on male wards whereas female nurses worked on all wards.

returned not retuned!

I'm just home from a hip replacement op in a private hospital. It was very well staffed. I enjoyed chatting to the nurses almost all of whom were from an agency, mostly long term. They all said they really liked the variety of work available through the agency but best of all they got three times the pay of NHS nurses (which they'd all been). Some travelled a long way to get to this hospital but they said they were given very good travel expenses.
It was all quite a surprise to me. They all seemed such well organised people making the most of their opportunities.
No shortage of nurses, just a shortage of NHS ones?

I think some of the problem for NHS nurses is the shifts they’re often scheduled to do. They’re not family-friendly, whereas with agency nursing you can pick and choose the shifts that fit in with your life.

Same applies to doctors. The shifts can be punishing - my dd recently worked 50 hours over 96 hours. Next week, she’s starting a new placement, begins at 8am, finishing at 1:30am next morning. I wouldn’t want to be the person who gets seen in the seventeenth hour on anyone’s shift. Some doctors choose locum work because again it offers more flexility and better pay.

The system is broken, really.

When I trained starting 1974 there was only 1 male student. I think it was to do with many of the above comments. Nowadays the pay and level of responsibility expected for the rate of pay may put people off. Pay is less than teaching, police for similar experience. I know this from my own family's careers. I wanted to be a nurse as I wanted to look after people and a schoolfriend had her appendix out so was impressed by the care she had. When I trained most doctors were male - many very pompous I may add.

I was just impressed at these nurses taking control of their careers in a way the nurses going back in my family couldn't dream of.

I’m struggling to see a solution to the shift cover issues you describe SueDonim. Wards have to be covered by nurses 24 hours a day, so whatever way you cut it shifts aren’t all going to be child friendly. It’s a major problem I agree, but if the shifts were worked around the staff wishes it couldn’t work.

Employing more staff would be a start, Casdon. My dd graduated as a medic last April and by July she was in sole charge of 200 surgical patients overnight. She could call on staff in other departments in a desperate emergency but my goodness, what a terrifying responsibility when you’re fresh out of uni at 24 years old.

I don’t think the situation is the same for doctors and nurses though SueDomin, although more of both would help of course. The doctors rotas are designed to have as many on duty in the daytime when all the support and diagnostic services are available, so they do have minimal staff on out of hours.

Ward nurses though have to provide consistent numbers for 24 hour cover, and having more staff would still require them to work shifts or there would be more than needed on some shifts and not enough on others. Also if a nurse works full time hours it would have to be on a shift basis or it would be unfair to others. It’s not easy.

Where my dd has been working, it’s quite interesting how the nursing staff work. Contrary to what I’d have thought, the night staff are the ones who provide the stability. It was almost always nurses from the same pool of staff, while the day staff could be any-and-everyone. Sometimes they would do just one shift and never work again in that department. I can’t imagine how hard it must be for a nurse to go ‘cold’ into a ward and work, then have to move on for the next shift. They must have to be very adaptable.

I’ve never seen that system in operation SueDomin, the norm is for a ward to have an allocated staff team, with the same staff over the 24 hours, the majority of whom rotate, it’s not good practice for staff to always work nights because their skills become outdated when they don’t come into contact with the wider hospital teams, or do all the duties that day staff do. Every hospital is different though, it does sound dysfunctional to work like the nursing teams are where your daughter is working.

I guess because of Covid (they had 800 Covid patients in the hospital at one point in the early months of this year ?) things may not be running as they usually would. She began her career weeks after the pandemic was declared so I imagine nothing has been as it would have been pre-pandemic.