Life Support: Three Nurses on the Front Lines - Softcover

Gordon, Suzanne

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0316329630 ISBN 13: 9780316329637

Publisher: Back Bay Books, 1998

Synopsis

An examination of the changing role of the nurse captures the day-to-day drama of three nurses' lives and demonstrates their crucial role in and outside of the hospitals

About this title

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 the Back Cover

Life Support offers an intimate and important look at what nurses do for patients and their families. It takes us right to the bedside on hospital wards and home visits, in clinics and emergency rooms, capturing the drama of nurses' work in the story of three RNs at Boston's Beth Israel Hospital. Gordon's heroines are nurse practitioner Ellen Kitchen, who bicycles through poor neighborhoods in Boston to visit elderly patients at home; oncology nurse Nancy Rumplik, whose technical skill and emotional support enable cancer patients to endure some of the most arduous high-tech medical treatments; and clinical nurse specialist Jeannie Chaisson, who helps new RNs and physicians begin their careers on a general medical floor. Life Support draws on the experience of these and other nurses to examine the history of their profession, the complex relationship between doctors and nurses, and the central role that nurses play in the final days of life, when care, not cure, is a patient's main concern. In addition, the book makes a powerful critique of hospital restructuring and managed care. Gordon shows how understaffing, shorter hospital stays, layoffs, and replacement of nurses by unlicensed personnel are threatening the quality of care and shifting more of its burden onto patients' families. She describes what consumers can do to resist these trends - through alliances with concerned providers.

Edition details

• Publisher: Back Bay Books
• Publication date: 1998
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0316329630
• ISBN 13: 9780316329637
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 352