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Men are more matter-of-fact, Martin said. They're less likely to base decisions on social or emotional considerations.

At his Texas hospital, Barnett said he's noticed that teens many times will be more compliant when he speaks to them than when a female nurse does. They respond to the male authority, he said, and sometimes the female nurses call on him when they're fearful of an unruly patient.

Men bring a new element to the work environment, said Herb Geary, MBA, RN, senior administrator for patient care and chief nursing officer at Good Samaritan Regional Medical Center in Phoenix.

"If you have an all-woman workforce, the women get catty," Geary said. "We as a society do best when there's a balance of men and women. Our patient population responds well to that."

Powerful messages

Robert Ismeurt, Ph.D., MS, RN, has been a nurse for 28 years and agrees that communication styles of male and female nurses differ.

"When men get together and have a dialogue, they don't care if they're going to be liked," said Ismeurt, an associate professor at the Arizona State University College of Nursing. "Women sometimes won't say something if it's going to ruffle feathers."

A male nurse might focus more on the bottom line and outcomes, but, Ismeurt said, female nurses care more about the process of communication and sharing information.

Ismeurt finds the academic side of nursing still predominantly a woman's world. That means there aren't a lot of men to mentor men who do come into nursing programs.

When he started one of his first teaching jobs, he discovered that the seven-story building in which he worked had two rest rooms on each floor, but they were both for women. When he asked where the male students and professors were suppose to go, he was directed to a bathroom in the basement of the building next door.

"If that isn't the most powerful message you could give, I don't know what is," Ismeurt said.

That was almost 15 years ago, but the profession still is viewed as a white woman's job, he said, and nurses need to make an effort to attract more men and more minorities into the profession.

Nursing makes a terrific career for a man, said Ismeurt, whose wife is a nurse. The two can juggle their schedules to accommodate child care needs, and they can go anywhere and quickly find a job. More men need to wake up to these benefits, Ismeurt said.

Mike Nilsson, RN, did just that more than 20 years ago when he retired as a New York City firefighter and became a nurse. In the early '70s, during another shortage of nurses, he said, the city started a grant program to train police officers and firefighters to be nurses. That got him thinking about the similarities between firefighting and nursing.

Both professions are committed to helping people and to public service, Nilsson said, so when he came close to retirement eligibility, even though the grant program had ended, he enrolled in nursing school.

"There was certainly some teasing, but that was normal give-and-take in the firehouse," Nilsson said of the reaction of his comrades. "They tease you about everything from your wife to your kids."

But his fellow firefighters pitched in and covered shifts so he could work weekends and nights and still go to school. Even back then, jumping from a virtually all-male to an all-female profession never was an issue, said Nilsson, a senior community health nurse supervisor for the Pasco County Health Department in Florida and also first vice president of the Florida Nurses Association.

Nilsson thinks many police officers and firefighters could be tapped to help fill the nursing shortage. In most departments, police officers and firefighters can retire after 20 years of service, he said, and many look for a second career. The profession needs a national recruitment effort targeting firehouses and police stations with grant money to fund education, he said.

"We definitely have to reach more men, but we have to get nursing recognized for what it is," Nilsson said.

That means improving nursing salaries, he said, and respecting the value nurses bring to the nation's health care system.

Contact Donna Hemmila at dhemmila@prodigy.net