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Students
and patients of all ethnic groups are included in
today's Advanced Practice arena. This combination
of varied cultural backgrounds and gender issues
presents a unique challenge to providing
sensitive and quality health care.
This discussion will focus on Nurse
Practitioners (NPs), Nurse Midwives (NMs), and
Physician Assistants (PAs).
While qualified persons of both sexes and all
races and cultures have access to educational
programs preparing nurse practitioners,
physician assistants and nurse midwives, there
are cultural/gender issues surrounding both their
educational experiences and actual practice
activities worthy of discussion. Probably the most
classic example of a field that continues to be
gender related is the practice of nurse
midwifery. There are approximately twenty male
Certified Nurse Midwives of a total 5,336
midwives in the nation. (Stone, 2000; Department
of Health and Human Services, 1996). Eighty seven
percent of the Certified Nurse Midwives are
white female and approximately 5 percent are
Asian -Pacific Islander, 3 percent are
American Indian/ |
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Alaskans,
2 percent are African American and 0.5
percent are Hispanic. (Department of Health and
Human Services, 1996).
Male midwifery students have a high attrition
rate. (Stone, 2000) Obvious issues related
to the acceptance of male nurse midwives
include the age old stereotype of the midwife
being a female even though male physicians have
been delivering babies along with midwives since
the latter part of the eighteenth century.
Historically, the female in the society was always
the one to attend the delivery of babies unless
there were problems, and then the physician was
called to either deliver the baby, or perform
surgery to remove the baby. (Donahue, 1985)
Many descriptions of the evolution of nursing and
nursing education do not mention the development
of early education programs for men or African
Americans or of their past value to healthcare.
The contributions made by African American nurses
in the provision of nursing care during the
development of nursing is vividly and clearly
portrayed in Black women in white by
Hines (1989) and in The Path We Tread, by
Carnegie (1999) References to the contributions of
males in nursing are more difficult to
ascertain and are scattered throughout the
literature. However, Watson (1999)
{Continued
on page three}
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