I was recently reading through the April 2009 AARC journal magazine and there were predictions on different health care topic which would affect RT's. One I saw that interested me was:
"There will be a national shortage of all health care providers in all sectors, Even those who frequently interact directly with patients."
This struck me as interesting because you would thinks with the unemployment rate as high as it is this would be a job sector which people would maybe flock to because of the job security of there always being sick people to take care of, but I guess this isn't so.
I starting thinking about this and realized there are large portions of society who are hardly even tapped to work as health care workers. These people would be the men of the United States. If you work in the health care sector think about it, who so you see mainly working directly with patients as a majority? Women right. There you can even break it down even more, these would mostly be white women also as a majority. Now I'm not trying to bring in the race card it's just a observation and I tried looking up some facts which I could find on this topic.
As for men in the health care workforce I wasn't able to find a overall men in health care number but I found a number for male nurses. According to the American Nursing Association only 6% of all RN's are male. Here in this article: "Is there a male nurse in the house?" about 7.5% of male nurse graduates leave the profession within 4 years of graduating. These are not good numbers.
Now when we look at the minority sector of the health care work force I found out that 1/4 of our population is made up of African American, Hispanic and American Indians but only 10% of them are in the health care field, this is according this this article: Diversity in Health care. This leaves a lot of possibilities for more health care workers.
Why don't more men work in the health care field? I believe it's the stigma and stereotype of women always being the nurses. When I say nurse I do picture a female and it's because of stereotype. Men also are not normally brought up to be caregivers like mothers. More men should really look into health care because were going to need to fill the gaps if this prediction is correct. Honestly there are a lot of perks, good pay, stability, job security, air conditioning and heat, hot looking nurses, friendly atmosphere, and the list goes one. If we are to fill these gaps in health care jobs were going to need to disperse of the stigma of men being in health care other than being doctors. Like we all know, Respiratory Therapy is a good field, and the women dig us.
