Okay, I don’t really think all male nurses are killers, and my premise is slightly misfounded given that this guy was so far just a nursing <student>. And I know there are female (and possibly male) nurses on this board, whose input I solicit on this question: Are male nurses disproportionately a bit . . . off?
I’ve had a vague impression for awhile that male nurses (who make up only five percent of the nurse population even today, and presumably less in the past, according to http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2002/09/06/health/main521057.shtml) turn up a little too often in stories such as:
I’m really not aiming at slandering a profession or a sex (and I know there are a number of “angel of death” cases involving female nurses too) – but is the extent of, um, inappropriate behavior higher per capita among male nurses? If so, why (the above CBS article suggests some general sources of career discontent, but severe enough to explain the really wacky stuff)? Anyone in health care noticed any patterns of disparate male/female nurse behavior?
I can understand any health care provider facing the “playing god” temptation. Shipman apparently also got some financial gain out of some of his victims by being in their wills, right?
Bryan, neither of us is going to find a separate FBI male nurse murder statistic. I found six examples of Male Nurses Behaving Badly stories without much trouble, though. I’m reasonably confident in the CBS stat that male nurses are 5% of nurse population. When I ran the parallel searches (“nurse killer,” etc.) I did not find anything close to 114 discrete Female Nurses Behaving Badly stories, as I’d have expected if the bad behavior were occurring at the same rate. I obviously do not claim this is authoritative (“male nurse” is a much easier term to search, and no one mentions a female nurse’s sex, and maybe the papers are more fascinated by the “incongruous” concept of male nurses so they over-report their exploits). But still, it strikes me as out of kilter.
Do you have any elaboration of why you believe “Nope” is the correct answer to my initial premise (I of course agree with your assessment that it’s a threshold question that moots the others if your Nope is correct)?
I graduated RN school with 20 females and 4 males, 4 white, married, 30-something males. Bright, motivated and acedemically successful, they passed their board exams and got good jobs. American Nursing needs more men to get their RNs and work. The media portrays male nurses as somehow wrong, somewhat less and not altogether a manly choice of work. Nurses don’t pass bedpans and make beds. We are your doctors’ eyes and ears and we’d better be good critical thinkers or face some dismal outcomes. There are huge potentials for abuse and harm and even financial gain. There are good nurses and indifferent nurses and selfish nurse and just-okay nurses, just as there are such people in every profession, male or female dominated.
Male nurses aren’t killing us. Bad people who are nurses and male are killing. Bad people who are female and nurses are killing. I don’t think that male nurses are killing people in a more disproportionate rate than male teachers or male salesclerks.
Cyn: I second everything you say about the need for good nurses and the dignity/importance of the profession. My OP assumes that it would be deplorable if, indeed, a small-but-still-disproportionate number of male nurses were doing bad stuff that harms the profession and its reputation.
When you say “I don’t think that male nurses are killing people in a <more> disproportionate rate” do I read that correctly to mean that you think they <are> killing at a rate disproportionate to female nurses, but that this disproportion is the same as the disproportion of male killers in general to female killers in general? The theory being, I guess, that men are (all else being equal) over-represented in crimes of violence, for whatever testosterone/societal-induced reason?
At a high level of generality, the plural of anecdote is indeed data, especially for sociological/criminological phenomena. Unless you believe that there is some way of obtaining a datum on a crime that didn’t actually happen in the real world (the report of which real world occurrence can indeed by characterized as an anecdote).
If you’re suggesting that I set up a controlled experiment and place a variety of male and female nurses in a variety of tempting murder-friendly situations (category a: the disoriented old patient looking to change his will; category b: the Munchausen by proxy candidate; category c: the unattended morphine drip), then keep rigorous records on how many actually do kill, I have to decline on grounds of lack of funding and moral aversion.
If you’re suggesting that the title of my OP was a bit needlessly moronic, you’re probably right, but you get the point.
If you’re saying my OP assumes facts not in evidence, I can’t agree, because it actually poses the question of whether my subjective impression has any objective basis – i.e., I’m admitting I don’t have statistics (though I suppose I could compile the number of victims-of-males and victims-of-females in the crimelibrary.com article and present that as a woefully-inadequate facsimile) and soliciting subjective/objective info. from those who may have it (and Cyn has provided helpful subjective info. on the male nurses she’s known).
If you’re saying that (because I am seeking objective confirmation of a subjective impression) this is not a GD but a factual GQ, you’re probably right but I knew opinion/subjectiveness would come into many of the answers so put it here.
I agree that this is an interesting topic, but I think we need to get some groundwork done before we get very far.
Are you saying that male nurses commit more crimes than female nurses in proportion to their numbers? OR
Do male nurses commit more crimes in proportion to the rest of males in the workplace? Males may commit more crimes in general and so this is not out of the norm.
What evidence, besides news reports, do you have that male nurses commit more crimes? Perhaps they commit crimes with more victims, but are a rarity. This might account for more news reports since more victims means more news coverage. Or perhaps they get caught more often, and other female nurse related killings go unreported.
Or the news reporting might be more biased to report on male nurses than female, being more unusual. Stranger trends have happened.
I’m just saying that we have may possible things going on here, and a little bit of statistics would really help focus the discussion. I think it’s an interesting topic, I’m just suggesting some ways to get some more answers.
Telemark, thks. for the suggestions; I agree with you that at present I’ve got about as much hard “proof” for my suggestion as Chuck Shepard does for his that guys with Wayne for a middle name end up on death row all the time.
I’m provisionally positing (redundant?) that (A) and (B) are both true, but obviously fishing for the very same stats. you suggest, or at least additional subjective experience, to substantiate either. Cyn, if I read her correctly, suggests (A) is true but not (B).
Considering that “nurse” originally meant to feed a baby by having it suck on your tit, I can understand how this image of nursing work as “not manly” might have gotten started.
I found this in a quick search, but haven’t gone through the links. Keep in mind that some of the conclusions the webpage reaches about managed care are a little out there, so the links may be biased in some way. It’s not a great place to start, but I didn’t spend too much time searching.
A google search involving the words male, nurse, killing, mercy ends up with a lot of grim reading. Let’s just say that there have been a lot of cases, and I didn’t notice a trend standing out.