SREB Conference Identifies Ways to Increase Diversity in Nursing, Among Nursing Faculty

The SREB Council on Collegiate Education for Nursing annual meeting focused this year on increasing racial/ethnic diversity in nursing and among nursing faculty. The Council works to improve the quality of nursing education in the 16 SREB states and beyond.

Some highlights from this year’s conference plenary sessions:

• Despite the current severe shortage of men nurses, men have a long history in nursing and deserve a greater role in the profession, asserted Dr. Russell E. Tranbarger, professor emeritus of nursing at East Carolina University. The author of a recent book on the history of men in nursing, he said institutions must recruit and retain men nursing candidates. He noted that only women were honored specifically as nurses on the national Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., despite the deaths of at least two men nurses during the conflict.
• The shortage of African-American men in nursing is an even greater problem, said Dr. Maggie Thurmond Dorsey, an assistant professor at the University of South Carolina Aiken. Her research found that 4.9 percent of registered nurses nationally are black men, and she noted the very low numbers of black male graduates from nursing programs in SREB states during a recent year: 64 black men graduated with four-year nursing degrees out of nearly 5,000 graduates, including three in Alabama, four in Arkansas, four in Maryland, and one in South Carolina, for example.
• Nursing lobbyists from Mississippi and North Carolina and a higher education official from Oklahoma described specific state legislation and policy strategies are helping their states recruit more high-quality nurses and nursing faculty.
• Youngsters can become interested in good health and careers in nursing through outreach efforts from nursing colleges into K-12 schools, said Norma C. Cooper, a former visiting professor at the University of Florida College of Nursing’s Jacksonville campus and currently a doctoral student at the University of South Florida. She described her “Future Gator Project,” which worked with children in Jacksonville.
• Scholars from Clayton State University in Georgia and the University of North Florida described efforts to create more racial/ethnic diversity among nursing students. The Georgia scholars also described their school’s efforts to enhance the academic skills of pre-nursing students.

Dr. Eula Aiken, the longtime director of the Council on Collegiate Education for Nursing, is available to speak with journalists about the nursing and nursing faculty shortage, along with the need for increasing racial/ethnic and gender diversity in the field. She can connect journalists with sources on this topic in each state. Please contact SREB Communications.

SREB, a nonprofit and nonpartisan organization based in Atlanta, Georgia, advises state education leaders on ways to improve education. SREB was created in 1948 by Southern governors and legislatures to help leaders in education and government work cooperatively to advance education and improve the social and economic life of the region. SREB has 16 member states: Alabama, Arkansas, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia and West Virginia. Each is represented by its governor and four gubernatorial appointees.