Life Support: Three Nurses on the Front Lines [Paperback]

Suzanne Gordon (Author), Claire Fagin (Contributor)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 12, 1998

This compelling portrait of three remarkable nurses offers an eye-opening account of the obstacles that nurses face within the medical community today, recognizing the critical role nurses play.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

In today's era of high-technology medicine, Suzanne Gordon, editor of books such as Caregiving: Readings in Knowledge, Practice, Ethics, and Politics, brings us the story of three nurses who work to humanize the experience of receiving medical care. We meet Nancy Rumplik, an outpatient nurse in an ambulatory clinic, as she prevents a nearly fatal allergic reaction to a course of chemotherapy. We meet nurse practitioner Ellen Kitchen, who provides home care to an 88-year-old man who does not want surgery for his prostate cancer. And we meet Jeannie Chaisson, a medical clinical nurse specialist, whose work continues after her shift ends as she helps a husband and daughter come to terms with a loved one's desire to stop treatment and succumb to death. Through their accounts Gordon tells us much about the health care system and about the nursing attention that allows people to tolerate the painful treatments and difficult choices that accompany high-technology medicine.

While Life Support draws attention to the often invisible work of nurses, it also highlights their plight in a health care system that increasingly focuses on the bottom line. Gordon painstakingly makes the point that it is not just surgery, ventilators, and dialysis machines that offer life support in the health care system. She shows how these nurses create an environment in which high-technology medicine can thrive, but that is not devoid of human care and concern. We learn how experienced nurses teach their colleagues, smooth over insensitive treatment by doctors, tend to illness, and bring dignity to death when treatment no longer works--all of which are roles that could not necessarily be filled by lower-paid, less-experienced personnel. In chronicling the work of Rumplik, Kitchen, and Chaisson, Gordon brings a story of the soul of America's health care system. --Amy Sessler

From Booklist

Gordon's aptly titled book tells the stories of three nurse practitioners^-advanced practice nurses who nursed patients at Boston's Beth Israel Hospital and at the patients' homes. Thanks to a program begun at Beth Israel in the 1970s, bedside nurses are permitted--and encouraged--to increase their education and yet remain bedside nurses; salaries grow step-by-step, so experienced nurses do not have to leave patient care for administrative offices. Stories of many different types of patients add life to Gordon's account of her three subjects' nurse-patient relationships and cogency to these nurses' additional roles as spokespersons for the patients to physicians and administrators. Gordon also examines, in her forceful but levelheaded journalist's style, contemporary nursing as it is affected by managed-care programs and administrative downsizing. Buttressing her points with statistics and arguments garnered from many interviews and the literature, she demonstrates that there has been an appalling downturn in nursing care and misled use of poorly trained assistants by some HMOs and insurance companies. William Beatty --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 352 pages
• Publisher: Back Bay Books; 1St Edition edition (May 12, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0316329630
• ISBN-13: 978-0316329637
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.8 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,473,504 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Physician Recommends Life Support for Peers & Patients, May 4, 1997

By A Customer

This review is from: Life Support: Three Nurses on the Front Lines (Hardcover)

This is a very moving and important book, which should be required reading for all medical students and doctors. Ms. Gordon who spent three years following three extra-ordinary nurses learned (and in the book presents) more knowledge and insights about sickness, pain, caring, and the health care system than my medicial residents learn during their three year (internal medicine) residency. Each of the three nurses covers a different part of the health care map (oncology chemotherapy nurse, home health nurse, and inpatient nurse) and illustrates the critical and often invisible role nurses play in health care. What the book does so ably is to highlight these special caring roles, and then place them in the context of what is happening in the U.S. health care system today. Ms. Gordon, an advocate for universal health insurance and consumer accoutablity starkly contrasts the bright light these and thousands of other of the quiet heros in nursing, with the dark side of market driven health care that threatens these values and heroism. If for nothing else, the book is worth reading for a useful and interesting history of the practice of nursing, which is interwoven with the stories of these three nurses. Nurses are the essence of quality and this book is a high quality look at their important and endangered role. (Dr. Gordon Schiff internist who directs the Clinical Quality Research Unit at Cook County Hospital in Chicago.

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Must Read for EVERYONE, September 14, 1997

By A Customer

This review is from: Life Support: Three Nurses on the Front Lines (Hardcover)

I've been a nurse for several years, and I got the book on recommendation from another nurse friend of mine. I was, and continue to be, amazed at the power of this book. It highlighted in stark words and numbers, problems facing health care today, while at the same time brightening the work with the all too human touch of nurses, patients and doctors. Once you read this book, you will understand why legislation such as The Patient Safety Act came to be, and why it is needed. It describes why nursing is so necessary, why even bathing or feeding a patient are not always within the realm of tasks to be assigned to unlicensed personnel. I urge everyone to read this book, and be touched by Gordon's powerful writing. Diana Katseyeanis, RN

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars LIFE SUPPORT is a MUST read for all nurses!, May 1, 1997

By A Customer

This review is from: Life Support: Three Nurses on the Front Lines (Hardcover)

Having been an RN for almost 30 years, there have been many times when my colleages and I have said, "We otta write a book! But then reality sets in as we have realized that noone would BELIEVE what we had to say about the health care system and our roles in particular.Bravo to Suzanne Gordon! She tells it like it is with the insight of someone who has been in the trenches and does not suffer from "tunnel vision!" My practice has been validated and the reading of her words was a shot in the arm!Nurses and those who live with, know and love them NEED to read this book and reread it. Pass it on or better yet buy them for your friends and family keeping your own copy for the future.This is a view of the reality of nursing, who we are and what we do, where we fit into the larger health care picture and what the health care system is trying to do to us."It takes a NURSE to save your life."Marilyn Anne Blythe, RN, CBC Brigham & Women's HospitalBoston, M