As a troubled bush teen, I found meaning in an unlikely place: I became a nurse
Teenage boys in country Australia are prone to a particularly destructive restlessness. It’s a longing for something morethat often manifests in drinking, drugtaking and other dangerous behaviour. It’s an agitation that leads them down perilous paths in search of meaning, worsened by the geographical and social isolation of the bush.
I’ve felt it. I left school at the end of year 10 and withdrew to my family property in rural New South Wales for two years. I was isolated and unhappy and desperate to feel that something – anything–mattered. I wanted to know that the world had substance, even if that process was painful or even traumatic.
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In the end, I found that meaning in an unlikely place: I became a nurse. Since then, I’ve seen pain and trauma, but I’ve observed plenty of other things too. Kindness, care, compassion. Love and revelation. Nursing, with its proximity to the body, mortality and emotion, is as strong a tether to reality and meaning as is possible.
As I approach nine years of nursing, it’s a path I urge other young rural men to follow, not just because it could change their lives, as it did mine. It’s also for the sake of the healthcare system. With the sector in crisis after three devastating years of Covid, it’s never been more important to attract new faces. In particular, the already understaffed rural workforce is crying out for fresh blood.
The problem in rural hospitals is devilishly simple. A smaller population means a smaller pool of available nurses, which means a smaller buffer between a shift with minimal staff and nostaff. These centres must then resort to unsustainable, exorbitantly expensive Band-Aid solutions such as fly in/ fly out nurses, agency nurses and copious overtime. What’s needed is permanent nursing staff who live in the communities they service.
This is easier said than done, partly because nurses who work in the bush tend to have grown up there. This has clear implications for geographically remote, sparsely populated regions.
The traditional solution has been to incentivise metropolitan nurses to move to the regions. However, knowing that bush nurses tend to have once been bush high schoolers opens the door for more creative thinking. Could the answer be to focus not on recruiting from the existing pool of nurses, but from the existing pool of rural Australians?
What if the best indicator of who is likely to have a long career as a rural nurse is not their current qualification, but their background?
If you take this as your starting point, you can consider sub-populations of rural Australia that might otherwise go unnoticed by nursing recruitment drives; which brings us back to young men. Just one in 10 Australian nurses is male, a trend mimicked worldwide. It represents a tantalising opportunity, particularly for rural and regional Australia: a vast, untapped resource of future healthcare professionals living where they would work.
Like many male nurses, I stumbled into the role without a clear idea of what I wanted from it, though I’m in the minority who joined the profession early in life and as a first career. A 2015 survey found that 18% of male nurses in Western Australia studied straight out of high school, compared with 49% of female nurses. More than half the men in the survey came to nursing from a previous career, compared with a quarter of the women.
These statistics suggest it’s rare to find a school-age boy who has thought about nursing. The survey also identified plenty of reasons this might be the case: a misperception that nursing is not appropriate for men, that it’s the domain of failed doctors, that men are too lazy or uncaring to be nurses, or that male nurses are “gay”. I’ve been heartened to see a marked shift in these perceptions in the last decade or so, but there is still plenty of work to do.
Clearly, the challenge starts early. School visits by male nurses, advertising campaigns aimed at teenagers, and a society-wide rebuttal to negative perceptions would help plant the idea of nursing in young, male heads.
Men are also more likely to be attracted to nursing by their perception of it as a stable, flexible, rewarding career. Communicating what motivated male nurses to join the workforce is especially critical in rural settings where boys may not otherwise be exposed to the idea.
Which brings me back to my own experiences. The problem could also be that men simply don’t think of it as an option. Nursing was not something I had considered until perhaps three days before I signed up to study it. Perhaps, if someone had framed it in the terms I have here – as a unique, grounding and life-affirming insight into the world as it really is – I would have leapt at it sooner. There are innumerable boys out there who would be as transformed by this remarkable job as I was. I don’t want them to miss out.
James McKenzie Watson is a nurse in the NSW Orana region. His debut novel Denizen is out now from Viking
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