Researchware

In the July 2010 (Volume 27, issue 3, pp. 291-306) issue of Health Marketing Quarterly, authors Mark John Somers, Linda Finch, and Dee Birnbaum, utilized HyperRESEARCH to discover approaches to market the Nursing profession.

In their artilce "Marketing Nursing as a Profession: Integrated Marketing Strategies to Address the Nursing Shortage," they found need for an integrated approach to building awareness. In their abstract, they note "The nursing shortage in the United States is at a crisis level characterized by critical shortages of highly trained nurses and of nursing faculty. Key issues in addressing these shortages include awareness and image-building, along with enhanced outreach programs. Although these issues are related to marketing theory, most studies in this area are based on a vocational choice model. This study was grounded in marketing theory and the results offer a new perspective for addressing the nursing shortage. In-depth interviews conducted with 31 first-year nursing students indicated that there were two distinct segments among nursing students: traditionals and instrumentals. Traditionals were attracted to nursing as a helping profession while instrumentals were interested in career-related rewards such as variety, mobility, and compensation. These findings were discussed in terms of building awareness and marketing programs for nursing students that are integrated across schools of nursing, private foundations and public agencies." The article can ve viewed online as PDF or HTML here.