Men in Nursing Literature review Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2250 words

Men in Nursing - Literature review Example Such understandings can cause escalation in the understanding of the obstacles that influence the staffing and retaining of men in the occupation, and they are dynamic if nursing is to grow, not only staffing policies focused on males, but more significantly, retention strategies that address current and uninterrupted gender relations that impact all nurses lives. Historical accounts of the monastic movement, dating back to the fourth and fifth centuries, show that people of the male gender participated actively in the provision or nursing care and protection to the ailing as members of religious groups. The Command of St John of Jerusalem, an order of military knights or knight’s hospitallers was the first of many orders of nobility established in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. The Cavaliers of St John of Jerusalem who defended Jerusalem during the crusades, later provided protection to travelling pilgrims and also built hospitals and castles across Europe that served as both lodgings for pilgrims and places to nurse the sick. This order continues to operate as the St John Ambulance Link, an organization formed to offer people the necessary training required to caater for the health needs of the injured and ill, in 1877. Men as nurses also participated in non-military nursing orders such as the Brothers of St Anthony. This order, founded in 1095, cared for victims of erysipelas, a disfiguring skin disease later called St Anthony’s fire. Other orders included the Hospitallers of St John of God, founded in the late sixteenth century in Spain, and the Alexian Brothers, who became a religious order in 1472 (Kauffman 1976). The Alexians, an order of uneducated craftsmen, preached the word of God and provided basic healthcare to the lowly in society in ancient Europe (Kauffman 1976). It was a culture of the Alexians to burry the dead, and the ministry gained momentum and appreciation during the plague years of the fourteenth and fifteenth centurie s. With the final disappearance of the plague in the eighteenth century, the Alexian Brothers gained fame because of their work. The insignificant, but rising number of males in the nursing occupation does not herald a liberal integration of male and female sex roles. The confirmation presented in this paper proposes that even in female-conquered jobs such as nursing, male-controlled gender associations which reflect a tall estimate of all that is manlike and masculine, play an important role in situating an uneven number of males in managerial and elite department positions. At the core of this sex dynamic is the need to detach the masculine from the less valued female. Male harbors do this by staffing plans that allow them to detach themselves from female coworkers and the quintessential female image of nursing itself, as a precondition to uplifting their own status and authority. They are assisted in this mission by male-controlled cultural organizations that craft and spread mal e benefit, as well as by female nurses themselves who, deliberately or automatically, nurture the vocations of male coworkers (Wheeler 1991). The low status of women in a society controlled by the male gender is manifest in the female dominated occupation of nursing. Here, stereotypical feminine traits of nurturing, caring, dependence and submission