Off Balance: The Real World of Ballet

An exploration of the ambitions, sacrifices, personal lives, and day-to-day activities of male and female dancers reveals the sometimes shocking realities of the world of ballet

Gordon, Suzanne

Humor & Entertainment

McGraw=Hill

Life Support: Three Nurses on the Front Lines

Medical Books

Allied Health Professions

Back Bay

Employing data from more than one hundred interviews, the author argues that women have become victims of a refashioned feminism that limits their goal to being treated as an equal to men--but in a man's world

Prisoners of Men's Dreams: Striking Out for a New Feminine Future

Politics & Social Sciences

Social Sciences

Little,Brown & Company

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

Health, Fitness & Dieting

Back Bay Books

A guide to architectural sites of the Eastern Caribbean, reflecting African, Amerindian, European, and East Indian influences.

Searching for Sugar Mills: An Architectural Guide to the Eastern Carribean

Arts & Photography

Hersh, Anne

Architecture

MACMILLAN PUB. LTD.

Black Mesa: the angel of death

John Day Co.

An exploration of the ambitions, sacrifices, personal lives, and day-to-day activities of male and female dancers reveals the sometimes shocking realities of the world of ballet

Pantheon

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)

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.

Administration & Medicine Economics

ILR PRESS

We are on the verge of the nation's worst nursing shortage in history. Dedicated nurses are leaving hospitals in droves, and there are not enough new recruits to the profession to meet demand. Even hospitals that were once very highly regarded for the quality of their nursing care, such as Boston's Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, now struggle to fill vacant positions. What happened? Dana Beth Weinberg argues that hospital restructuring in the 1990s is to blame. 
In their attempts to retain profit margins or even just to stay afloat, hospitals adopted a common set of practices to cut costs and increase revenues. Many strategies squeezed greater productivity out of nurses and other hospital workers. Nurses' workloads increased to the point that even the most skilled nurses questioned whether they could provide minimal, safe care to patients. As hospitals hemorrhaged money, it seemed that no one―not hospital administrators, not doctors―felt they could afford to listen to nurses.
Through a careful look at the effects of the restructuring strategies chosen and implemented by Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, the author examines management's efforts to balance service and survival. By showing the effects of hospital restructuring on nurses' ability to plan, evaluate, and deliver excellent care, Weinberg provides a stinging indictment of standard industry practices that underestimate the contribution nurses make both to hospitals and to patient care.

Code Green: Money-Driven Hospitals and the Dismantling of Nursing (The Culture and Politics of Health Care Work)

Business & Money

Weinberg, Dana Beth

Economics

Legally mandated nurse-to-patient ratios are one of the most controversial topics in health care today. Ratio advocates believe that minimum staffing levels are essential for quality care, better working conditions, and higher rates of RN recruitment and retention that would alleviate the current global nursing shortage. Opponents claim that ratios will unfairly burden hospital budgets, while reducing management flexibility in addressing patient needs. 
Safety in Numbers is the first book to examine the arguments for and against ratios. Utilizing survey data, interviews, and other original research, Suzanne Gordon, John Buchanan, and Tanya Bretherton weigh the cost, benefits, and effectiveness of ratios in California and the state of Victoria in Australia, the two places where RN staffing levels have been mandated the longest. They show how hospital cost cutting and layoffs in the 1990s created larger workloads and deteriorating conditions for both nurses and their patients―leading nursing organizations to embrace staffing level regulation. The authors provide an in-depth account of the difficult but ultimately successful campaigns waged by nurses and their allies to win mandated ratios. Safety in Numbers then reports on how nurses, hospital administrators, and health care policymakers handled ratio implementation.
With at least fourteen states in the United States and several other countries now considering staffing level regulation, this balanced assessment of the impact of ratios on patient outcomes and RN job performance and satisfaction could not be timelier. The authors' history and analysis of the nurse-to-patient ratios debate will be welcomed as an invaluable guide for patient advocates, nurses, health care managers, public officials, and anyone else concerned about the quality of patient care in the United States and the world.

Safety in Numbers: Nurse-to-Patient Ratios and the Future of Health Care (The Culture and Politics of Health Care Work)

Buchanan, John

Bretherton, Tanya

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Gordon, Suzanne. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Gordon, Suzanne