As if trying to attract potential nurses into a low-paid, stressful profession wasn't hard enough, hospitals in Bradford faced a further problem: a reluctance among young Asian women to consider nursing as a career.

South Asians account for around 17% of the population covered by Bradford health authority, and many of them are of Pakistani origin. But while Asian families would encourage their daughters to go into medicine, with its university education, career opportunities, good pay and high status, nursing was seen as a poor relation.

"Nursing isn't really seen as an appropriate career for Asian women. And for some Muslims it was seen as taboo for women to nurse men," says Wendy Eastell, assistant head of development for nursing and midwifery at Bradford Hospitals NHS trust.

Last year the trust, together with two neighbouring trusts, the health authority and the predominantly Asian Belle Vue school launched a Preparation for Nursing initiative aimed at attracting young Asian women to the profession.

Jan Lee, assistant head teacher at Belle Vue but currently seconded to the health authority, says: "We wanted to make nursing and midwifery an 'honourable profession', and hopefully persuade some of the girls to choose nursing as a career."

Nurses went into the school to talk about nursing to the girls and their families. The centrepiece of the initiative was a buddy scheme in which 17 and 18-year olds doing A-levels or GNVQs volunteered to shadow a qualified nurse on her ward duties. The girls were given a nurse's uniform, and required to spend two hours a week of their own time on the wards for 12 weeks. They had to keep a record of their experience, and report back at the end of the programme.

"On the whole it was a very positive experience. They realised that nurses had a much more positive input into the medical side of things than they had expected, and that it wasn't a traditional 'doctor's handmaiden' image," says Eastell. "Early on they began to get a feeling of being useful, and of being needed by the patients, which was satisfying. They also realised just how much help they could be from a language point of view in translating for the nurses."

On the first programme, which ran from September to December 1999, six students opted to go into nurse training. A subsequent Preparing for Midwifery programme persuaded three of the six girls on the programme to choose midwifery as a career.

"The girls had not considered nursing. It was just a word mentioned in careers lessons. But Preparation for Nursing made it more than just a word. I like to think we have made a small contribution to nursing recruitment," says Lee.

She says that collaboration between the NHS and the school, students and their families was essential to the success of the programme. The initiative was chosen by ministers to be a national NHS beacon site as "an outstanding example of good practice" that was making "a real difference to patients in the NHS".

The health authority is now looking at extending the initiative to cover other areas suffering from skills shortages, such as physiotherapy and radiography, and at introducing it into more local schools.

"It is an undoubted success, and we are going to continue with it," says Eastell.