Nursing Against the Odds - (Culture and Politics of Health Care Work) by Suzanne Gordon (Paperback)

About the Book

A leading health care journalist unravels the complexity of the current nursing shortage while offering possible solutions to the resulting health care crisis.

Book Synopsis

In the United States and throughout the industrialized world, just as the population of older and sicker patients is about to explode, we have a major shortage of nurses. Why are so many RNs dropping out of health care's largest profession? How will the lack of skilled, experienced caregivers affect patients? These are some of the questions addressed by Suzanne Gordon's definitive account of the world's nursing crisis. In Nursing against the Odds, one of North America's leading health care journalists draws on in-depth interviews, research studies, and extensive firsthand reporting to help readers better understand the myriad causes of and possible solutions to the current crisis.

Gordon examines how health care cost cutting and hospital restructuring undermine the working conditions necessary for quality care. She shows how the historically troubled workplace relationships between RNs and physicians become even more dysfunctional in modern hospitals. In Gordon's view, the public image of nurses continues to suffer from negative media stereotyping in medical shows on television and from shoddy press coverage of the important role RNs play in the delivery of health care.

Gordon also identifies the class and status divisions within the profession that hinder a much-needed defense of bedside nursing. She explains why some policy panaceas--hiring more temporary workers, importing RNs from less-developed countries--fail to address the forces that drive nurses out of their workplaces. To promote better care, Gordon calls for a broad agenda that includes safer staffing, improved scheduling, and other policy changes that would give nurses a greater voice at work. She explores how doctors and nurses can collaborate more effectively and what medical and nursing education must do to foster such cooperation. Finally, Gordon outlines ways in which RNs can successfully take their case to the public while campaigning for health care system reform that actually funds necessary nursing care.

Review Quotes

Exhausted by heavy work, mandatory overtime, and the stress of looking after hospital patients who are sicker, frailer, and in need of ever more high-tech intervention, nurses are leaving the bedside faster than they can be replaced.... People who are interested in the health care system or in their own health care should pay attention to the issues Ms. Gordon raises in this book. But nurses especially should read it.

--Cornelia Dean "New York Times"

Gordon uses anecdotes, research findings, and statistics to develop the list of contributing factors and potential resolutions to the current nursing shortage in more developed countries. She offers a comprehensive, international overview of the key issues.

--Ellen Zupa "The Lancet"

Gordon's detailed information in the form of interviews, documented research, groundbreaking advances and setbacks, statistics, and opinions about the state of nursing are compelling.... You will recognize that there isn't any issue related to nurses and nursing that Gordon hasn't examined.... This book isn't just for nurses. It is a comprehensive depiction of how nursing is indeed working against the odds to provide a safe, caring environment for patients. Nurses hold the key to the solutions. Gordon gives us the data and talking points to move to the action stage.

--Kay Bensing "Advance for Nurses"

One of the most comprehensive and insightful discussions... of the complex set of relationships that have developed over the years between doctors and nurses. Nursing against the Odds should be required reading for all nurses, doctors, and nursing and medical students, ... who will find this book both provocative and enlightening.

-- "New England Journal of Medicine"

Suzanne Gordon, a national award-winning journalist, author, and adjunct professor, is an advocate for all nurses. Gordon isn't a nurse, but believes nursing to be an honorable profession and the backbone of our health care system.... This book addresses the main forces that drive nurses out of their workplace; the crucial issues that deprive communities of adequate care of the sick, and the class and status divisions within the profession. But Gordon doesn't focus only on the problems, past and present, facing the nursing profession, but the remedies as well.

--Terry RatnerRNMFA "Nurseweek"

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 disasters, Gordon fortunately places the issues of nurses and doctors at work in a larger historical and sociological context.

--Barbara A. Mark, Ph.D., RN, FAAN "Journal of the American Medical Association"

About the Author

Suzanne Gordon is an award-winning journalist. She is the author of Life Support: Three Nurses on the Front Lines, the coauthor of From Silence to Voice: What Nurses Know and Must Communicate to the Public (also from Cornell), and has written for the New York Times, the Boston Globe, and the Toronto Globe and Mail, among many other publications. Gordon is also Assistant Adjunct Professor at the University of California, San Francisco School of Nursing and was a health care commentator on Public Radio International's Marketplace.