Why so few nurses are men

      Ask health professionals in any country what the biggest problem in their health-care system is and one of the most common answers is the shortage of nurses. In ageing rich countries, demand for nursing care is becoming increasingly insatiable. Britain’s National Health Service, for example, has 40,000-odd nurse vacancies. Poor countries struggle with the emigration of nurses for greener pastures. One obvious solution seems neglected: recruit more men. Typically, just 5-10% of nurses registered in a given country are men. Why so few?

      Views of nursing as a “woman’s job” have deep roots. Florence Nightingale, who established the principles of modern nursing in the 1860s, insisted that men’s “hard and horny” hands were “not fitted to touch, bathe and dress wounded limbs”. In Britain the Royal College of Nursing, the profession’s union, did not even admit men as members until 1960. Some nursing schools in America started admitting men only in 1982, after a Supreme Court ruling forced them to. Senior nurse titles such as “sister” (a ward manager) and “matron” (which in some countries is used for men as well) do not help matters. Unsurprisingly, some older people do not even know that men can be nurses too. Male nurses often encounter patients who assume they are doctors.

      Another problem is that beliefs about what a nursing job entails are often outdated – in ways that may be particularly off-putting for men. In films, nurses are commonly portrayed as the helpers of heroic male doctors. In fact, nurses do most of their work independently and are the first responders to patients in crisis. To dispel myths, nurse-recruitment campaigns display nursing as a professional job with career progression, specialisms like anaesthetics, cardiology or emergency care, and use for skills related to technology, innovation and leadership. However, attracting men without playing to gender stereotypes can be tricky. “Are you man enough to be a nurse?”, the slogan of an American campaign, was involved in controversy.

      Nursing is not a career many boys aspire to, or are encouraged to consider. Only two-fifths of British parents say they would be proud if their son became a nurse. Because of all this, men who go into nursing are usually already closely familiar with the job. Some are following in the career footsteps of their mothers. Others decide that the job would suit them after they see a male nurse care for a relative or they themselves get care from a male nurse when hospitalised. Although many gender stereotypes about jobs and caring have crumbled, nursing has, so far, remained unaffected.

                                              (www.economist.com, 22.08.2018. Adaptado.)

Read the text below.

Opportunity Cost

This phenomenon goes by the name of ‘opportunity cost,’ since by not investing in more equipment and a more rigid production flow, the company is forgoing the opportunity to earn increased profits. These costs are every bite as real as the payment of dollars out-of-pocket.

This notion _______ opportunity cost can be reinforced _________ a famous saying ______ Benjamin Franklin, no slouch himself _________ operations management. To make the point, however, we must make a brief excursion into logic. One truth of logic is the validity of the so-called contrapositive, which says simply that if the statement “If A, then B” is true, then it is also true that “If not B, then not A.” That is, of every time A occurs B follows, then we can be sure that if B does not occur, then A did not occur as well. Enough logic then, and back to Ben Franklin.

One of his Poor Richard sayings is that “A penny saved is a penny earned.” We have all recognized the truth of that since childhood, but I assert that by this saying Ben showed us he knows everything about opportunity cost. After all, what is the contrapositive of “A penny not earned is a penny not saved (i.e., a penny sent). All we are saying by this notion of opportunity cost is that “a penny not earned (an opportunity forgone) is a penny spent.” We shall often have occasion to consider opportunity costs, in analyzing and deciding various operations issues.

SCHMENNER, Roger W. Production/Operations Management. 5th Edition. Prentice-Hall, 1993.

Nathalie, the swimmer who lost a leg

Nathalie du Toit, the South African swimmer, was only seventeen when she lost her leg in a road accident. She was going to a training session at the swimming pool on her motorbike when a car hit her. Her leg had to be amputated at the knee. At the time she was one of South Africa’s most promising young swimmers. Everybody thought that she would never be able to swim competitively again.

But Nathalie was determined to carry on. She went back into the pool only three months after the accident. And just one year later, at the Commonwalth Games in Manchester, she swam 800 meters in 9 minutes 11:38 seconds and qualified for the final – but not for disabled swimmers, for able-bodied ones! Althought she didn’t win a medal, she still made history.

‘I remember how thrilled I was the first time that I swam after recovering from the operation – it felt like my leg was there. It still does,’ says Nathalie. The water is the gift that gives me back my leg. I’m still the same person I was before the accident. I believe everything happens in life for a reason. You cant go back and change anything. Swimming was my life and still is. My dream is to swim faster than I did before the accident.’

Oxeden, C; KOENIG, C. New English File. Intermediate Student’s Book. OXFORD University Press. (3c-47).

                        When does the brain work best?

                     The peak times and ages for learning

      What’s your ideal time of the day for brain performance? Surprisingly, the answer to this isn’t as simple as being a morning or a night person. New research has shown that certain times of the day are best for completing specific tasks, and listening to your body’s natural clock may help you to accomplish more in 24 hours.

      Science suggests that the best time for our natural peak productivity is late morning. Our body temperatures start to rise just before we wake up in the morning and continue to increase through midday, Steve Kay, a professor of molecular and computational biology at the University of Southern California told The Wall Street Journal. This gradual increase in body temperature means that our working memory, alertness, and concentration also gradually improve, peaking at about mid morning. Our alertness tends to dip after this point, but one study suggested that midday fatigue may actually boost our creative abilities. For a 2011 study, 428 students were asked to solve a series of two types of problems, requiring either analytical or novel thinking. Results showed that their performance on the second type was best at non-peak times of day when they were tired.

      As for the age where our brains are at peak condition, science has long held that fluid intelligence, or the ability to think quickly and recall information, peaks at around age 20. However, a 2015 study revealed that peak brain age is far more complicated than previously believed and concluded that there are about 30 subsets of intelligence, all of which peak at different ages for different people. For example, the study found that raw speed in processing information appears to peak around age 18 or 19, then immediately starts to decline, but short-term memory continues to improve until around age 25, and then begins to drop around age 35, Medical Xpress reported. The ability to evaluate other people’s emotional states peaked much later, in the 40s or 50s. In addition, the study suggested that out our vocabulary may peak as late as our 60s’s or 70’s.

      Still, while working according to your body’s natural clock may sound helpful, it’s important to remember that these times may differ from person to person. On average, people can be divided into two distinct groups: morning people tend to wake up and go to sleep earlier and to be most productive early in the day. Evening people tend to wake up later, start more slowly and peak in the evening. If being a morning or evening person has been working for you the majority of your life, it may be best to not fix what’s not broken.

           (Dana Dovey. www.medicaldaily.com, 08.08.2016. Adaptado.)