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

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

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