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Nursing and Health Care
Nursing Against the Odds: How Health Care Cost Cutting, Media Stereotypes, and Medical Hubris Undermine Nurses and Patient Care
by Suzanne Gordon (The Culture and Politics of Health Care Work), 489 pp, $29.95, ISBN 0-8014-3976-0, Ithaca, NY, ILR Press/Cornell University Press, 2005.
JAMA. 2005;294:848-849.
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Suzanne Gordon, an award-winning journalist and frequent contributor to the Boston Globe, New York Times, and Washington Post, has written a wide-ranging and sometimes exasperating but ultimately worthwhile book about the current state of nursing and health care.
The first section, "Nurses and Doctors at Work," portrays with great empathy—and more than an occasional lapse of reportorial objectivity—the frustrations of today’s registered nurses in an environment in which hospitals are financially strapped, physicians overworked and stressed, patients incredibly sick, and nurses’ work under-appreciated and frequently invisible. Physicians are often portrayed as callous, deliberately and sometimes offensively dismissive of nurses’ contributions to patient well-being. The nurses Gordon describes in multiple anecdotes are almost always clinically astute and are frequently the first, occasionally the only, professionals to observe, interpret, and respond appropriately to signs and symptoms that foretell disaster for the patient. Despite the horror stories of disasters and averted . . . [Full Text of this Article]
Barbara A. Mark, PhD, RN, FAAN, Reviewer
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
bmark@email.unc.edu
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