Nursing Against The Odds: How Health Care Cost Cutting, Media Stereotypes, And Medical Hubris Undermine Nurses And Patient Care (The Culture and Politics of Health Care Work) (Hardcover)

by Suzanne Gordon (Author) "Until February 1998, I thought I understood nursing..." (more)
Key Phrases: United States, Beth Israel, New York (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Review
"Up-to-date investigations like Gordon's should be required reading for nursing students, public healthcare advocates, and all medical interns." -- Library Journal, March 15, 2005

Product Description
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.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 504 pages
• Publisher: Cornell University Press; 1 edition (March 17, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0801439760
• ISBN-13: 978-0801439766
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 7.1 x 1.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (17 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #504,335 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

72 of 73 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Failure of Nurses to Take Care of Self threatens Us All, September 8, 2005

By	Michael Newell (Haddonfield, NJ) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Nursing Against the Odds: How Health Care Cost Cutting, Media Stereotypes, and Medical Hubris Undermine Nurses and Patient Care (Suzanne Gordon, ILR/Cornell University Press)is a first rate work of journalism, the beginning of a civilian audit that should have been documented by the profession itself, either in its primary practice venue (hospitals) or by its primary proponents of its own value (academics and the American Nurses Association).

Nursing Against the Odds documents not only the manipulation of nursing by the hospital industry, the medical profession and the media (reinforced by drug and device manufacturer Johnson & Johnson). It documents that nurses themselves think so little of their own contribution that they are unable or afraid to speak up when given the chance.

Nursing Against the Odds also documents the real tragedy of the hospital reengineering movement of the 1990s. This response to the challenge to health providers by the Managed Care companies to show their value in the marketplace was the wrong tactic at the wrong time by the wrong people. Michael Hammer and James Champy made a point to warn (in Reengineering the Corporation: A Manifesto for Business Revolution, 1993) that the chief financial officer should never be tasked to manage the reengineering effort, simply because it was not about cutting costs but raising quality. Since the big accounting firms had the ear of the hospital CFOs this is exactly what happened. So the same folks that brought us Enron messed up hospitals and nursing so thoroughly that neither has yet to recover.

The contribution of Nursing Academia and the American Nurses Association during this cascading iatrogenesis has been less than helpful. Nursing schools teach care planning using a methodology that is largely an intellectual fraud. The Nursing Diagnosis Model demands so many mental gyrations that most students don't get it by the time they graduate. Nursing documentation in the clinical record using this method invites ridicule by other health professionals. Consequently Nursing Diagnosis does not inspire care planning and assist in documenting progress. Nursing care plan documentation is simply ignored or mindless phrases show up in clinical documents ("buffing the chart") that no one reads. Nursing Diagnosis phrases like "situational low self-esteem" or "ineffective coping" are more descriptive of Nursing's present state of affairs and its inability to assert itself as an independent profession.

While many academics look down their noses at union membership by calling it unprofessional, they forget that most professions bill for their time in fractions of an hour and produce quantifiable outcomes for their work. (Not many nursing graduates recognize the SF-36 or the FIM, common health outcome measurements tools.) Most professionals have figured out ways to protect themselves and their families, either by bargaining units or individual, enforceable contracts that protect against the hazards of their work or the vicissitudes of their employer. The fact that Nursing is unable to protect itself, and that this leaves anyone who is subjected to a hospital stay in grave danger, should be enough to give us all some motivation to put Nursing Against the Odds at the top of everyone's reading list.

Michael Newell, RN, MSN
Haddonfield, NJ

19 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Hard Read, February 11, 2006

By	Renee V. Kennedy (British Columbia, Canada) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I have become a shameless, devoted Suzanne Gordon "follower" since reading her: "From Silence to Voice".
Suzanne has grabbed the bull by the horns, "put the blame on Mame" for the nursing crisis and offers constructive solutions in order to recruit and retain nurses.
"Nursing against the Odds", is a book that management/administration, government, nurses,student, patients and potential patients/the public - should read in order to understand "what" exactly is going on within the healthcare setting and how to make amends.
"Nursing Against the Odds" was extremely hard for me to read...emotionally. It has taken me months of picking up and putting down the book...especially getting through "Part 3" in such chapters as: "Mangling Care" and "Nurses on the Ropes".
I felt such rage reading what I know is to be so true.
Suzanne details the many players who are " not just supporting good [nursing] practice, they are undermining good practice" and notes that "when nurses believe that exit is their only option, they are really expressing their profound sense of defeat."
And exiting with their feet, they are.
It's deafening and deadly.

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Reality 101, June 10, 2006

By	Lisa A. Jones (tacoma, wa) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Nursing Against the Odds: How Health Care Cost Cutting, Media Stereotypes, And Medical Hubris Undermine Nurses And Patient Care (The Culture and Politics of Health Care Work) (Paperback)

While of benefiit to nurses everywhere in just reminding us we are not alone, this book also reminds us how we may be our own worst enemy in promoting change.
Sadly, those who could benefit most from this book, consumers, CEO's and physicians will probably never read it. In light of the JCAHO white paper on the nursing shortage, why isn't JCAHO also implenting and assessing facilities based on their own strategy recommendations? Without nurses at the bedside, medicine is headed for the rocks!
This is a very powerful book on nursing today.
Lisa Jones RN IBCLC