Nursing Against The Odds

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.

"Nursing, everyone believes, is the caring profession. Texts on caring line the walls of nursing schools and student shelves. Indeed, the discipline of nursing is often known as the 'caring science.' Because of their caring reputation, nurses top the polls as the most-trustworthy professionals. Yet, in spite of what seems to be an endless outpouring of public support, in almost every country in the world nursing is under threat, in the practice setting and in the academic sector. Indeed, its standing as a regulated profession is constantly challenged. In our view, this paradox is neither accidental nor natural but, in great part, the logical consequence of the fact that nurses and their organizations place such a heavy emphasis on nursing's and nurses' virtues rather than on their knowledge and concrete contributions."—from the Introduction In a series of provocative essays, The Complexities of Care rejects the assumption that nursing work is primarily emotional and relational. The contributors-international experts on nursing- all argue that caring discourse in nursing is a dangerous oversimplification that has in fact created many dilemmas within the profession and in the health care system. This book offers a long-overdue exploration of care at a pivotal moment in the history of health care. The ideas presented here will foster a critical debate that will assist nurses to better understand the nature and meaning of the nurse-patient relationship, confront challenges to their work and their profession, and deliver the services patients need now and into the future.

Following on from the publication of Safe and Effective Staffing: the Real Picture in May 2017, the RCN launched a survey of nursing and midwifery staff in the UK. The survey asked people about their last shift or day worked in health or social care. Over 30,000 responses were received in just two weeks, providing insight into staff experiences and staffing levels across the UK. The findings provide a strong voice from nursing staff, clearly describing the impact that poor staffing has on both patient care and their own wellbeing. Some of the experiences and stories shared via the survey have been included throughout the report.

In this book, Suzanne Gordon describes the everyday work of three RNs in Boston—a nurse practitioner, an oncology nurse, and a clinical nurse specialist on a medical unit. At a time when nursing is often undervalued and nurses themselves in short supply, Life Support provides a vivid, engaging, and intimate portrait of health care's largest profession and the important role it plays in patients' lives. Life Support is essential reading for working nurses, nursing students, and anyone considering a career in nursing as well as for physicians and health policy makers seeking a better understanding of what nurses do and why we need them. For the Cornell edition of this landmark work, Gordon has written a new introduction that describes the current nursing crisis and its impact on bedside nurses like those she profiled in the book.

As nurses face the ongoing challenges of an increasing need for their services combined with economic pressures, members of the largest profession in health care must become more visible, vocal, and influential. The first communication guidebook designed expressly for nurses, From Silence to Voice helps nurses understand and overcome the self-silencing that often leads RNs to downplay their own expertise and their contributions to the care of the sick and the health of the public. Bernice Buresh and Suzanne Gordon teach nurses, nurse educators, and nurse researchers critical skills they can use to explain their work to other health-care professionals, journalists, policymakers, and political representatives. From Silence to Voice features stories about nurses who ensure that patients receive appropriate, timely, and even life-saving care, nurses who make all the difference while crises are underway but whose contributions are neglected in medical charts and thank-you notes, nurses who are left out altogether or obscured by the generic "nurse." However, the book also provides detailed accounts of nurses who do make their voices heard, who do make their concerns public-- and it shows how those successes can be duplicated. Buresh and Gordon draw on real-world examples that will help nurses to - gain respect for themselves as professionals, - communicate well with both patients and health-care colleagues, - understand how the news media work, - collaborate with public relations professionals, - write effective letters to the editor and publish op-ed pieces, - appear on television and radio, and - promote research on nursing.

There are fundamental tasks common to every society: children have to be raised, homes need to be cleaned, meals need to be prepared, and people who are elderly, ill, or disabled need care. Day in, day out, these responsibilities can involve both monotonous drudgery and untold rewards for those performing them, whether they are family members, friends, or paid workers. These are jobs that cannot be outsourced, because they involve the most intimate spaces of our everyday lives--our homes, our bodies, and our families. Mignon Duffy uses a historical and comparative approach to examine and critique the entire twentieth-century history of paid care work--including health care, education and child care, and social services--drawing on an in-depth analysis of U.S. Census data as well as a range of occupational histories. Making Care Count focuses on change and continuity in the social organization along with cultural construction of the labor of care and its relationship to gender, racial-ethnic, and class inequalities. Debunking popular understandings of how we came to be in a "care crisis," this book stands apart as an historical quantitative study in a literature crowded with contemporary, qualitative studies, proposing well-developed policy approaches that grow out of the theoretical and empirical arguments.

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