Becker's Hospital Review

56 CMO / CARE DELIVERY More men are going into nursing: What about travel nursing? By Mackenzie Bean, Jakob Emerson and Marissa Plescia A s the number of male nurses con- tinues to increase nationwide and the major demand for travel nurs- es keeps growing at a record pace, it stands to reason that more men are going into travel nursing. The problem is that very lit- tle data exists to support that assumption. Becker's decided to investigate why men are deciding to enter the travel nursing in- dustry, and when data may become avail- able to reveal just how many are making the jump. In the span of four decades, the percentage of male nurses nationwide rose from under 2 percent in 1977 to 9.6 percent in 2018. That number remained consistent through the most recent comprehensive survey on the topic conducted in 2020. As nurses deal with burnout amid the pan- demic, the travel nursing industry has ex- ploded, which provides more flexibility and exponentially higher pay — largely due to hospitals' dependence on contract nurses during the national labor shortage. In 2020, travel nursing grew 35 percent, and it is ex- pected to rise another 40 percent in the fu- ture, Health Affairs reported in January. Travel nurse wages rose 25 percent in April 2020, at the beginning of the pandemic, according to Health Affairs. They can now make between $5,000 and $10,000 a week. So more men are becoming nurses, and trav- el nursing nationwide is expected to contin- ue its substantial growth — but does that mean more men are becoming travel nurses? The data surrounding the potential trend is foggy. AMN Healthcare, one of the largest healthcare staffing agencies in the country, told Becker's its data on the prevalence of male travel nurses was incomplete. RNnet- work, another large staffing firm, said 60 percent of its travel nurses were female in 2019, 14 percent were male and 26 percent did not report a gender. In 2022, 55 per- cent of the firm's nurses were female, 10 percent were male and 35 percent did not disclose a gender. "One of the challenges is that we do not have much national public data that pro- vides demographic detail on travel nurses, let alone travelers in other occupations," Bianca Frogner, PhD, said. Dr. Frogner is a professor at the UW School of Medicine in Seattle. She is also an adjunct professor of health systems and population health and director of the UW Center for Health Workforce Studies. According to Dr Frogner, there is one data- set that could give some insight: the Na- tional Sample Survey of Registered Nurses collected by the U.S. Census Bureau. The latest data is from 2018, before the effect of COVID-19 and when there were much fewer travel nurses than there are now. The 2018 NSSRN survey asked nurses how they would best describe their employ- ment position and included the option "employed through an employment agency as a traveling nurse." The final report, however, does not include summary statistics of nurses that checked "If all goes as planned, that will provide us more insight into whether male representation of travel nurses is higher than the general nursing population." Bianca Frogner, PhD, Professor at UW School of Medicine AI can tell a patient's race by only X-rays, stumping researchers By Georgina Gonzalez R esearchers have been able to train a deep learning model to accurately predict a patient's race from just medical images, like X-rays and CT scans leaving re- searchers confused, reported the Boston Globe May 13. In the study published in The Lancet Digital Health May 11, the researchers showed the machine learning pro- gram a large number of X-rays and CT scans that were labeled with the patient's race. The system was then asked the race of unlabeled sets of pictures, and was able to with an over 90 percent accuracy. "When my graduate students showed me some of the results that were in this paper, I actually thought it must be a mistake," said Marzyeh Ghassemi, PhD, a coauthor of the paper and MIT professor. Dr. Ghassemi is hypothesizing that the algorithm may detect melanin content from medical images in a way that human users haven't realized yet, but says it will require more research to understand. "We need to take a pause,'' Leo Anthony Celi, MD, a coauthor and professor at Harvard Medical School told the Globe. "We cannot rush bringing the algorithms to hospitals and clinics until we're sure they're not making racist decisions or sexist decisions." n

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