Our Nurses: The Workers Point Of View

[Itsthetruth]

CounterPunch
March 14, 2005

The Workers' View
Nursing Against the Odds
By DAVID SWANSON

"Nursing Against the Odds: How Health Care Cost Cutting, Media Stereotypes, and Medical Hubris Undermine Nurses and Patient Care,"
by Suzanne Gordon
Cornell University Press, 450 pages.

What nurses actually do is invisible to us, even to patients, even to nurses themselves. We think in terms of 19th century stereotypes. We picture nurses in hats that no living nurse has worn. We imagine them as the unskilled humanizing assistants to doctors who do all the scientific thinking. We imagine that only women can be nurses -- and only women who lack intelligence and ambition. Being a nurse, like being a teacher, is a second-best career perhaps because its aim is not the advancement of scientific knowledge. Never mind that nurses contribute as much as doctors to medical knowledge or that there are purposes more noble in life than the accumulation of knowledge.

Gordon's book is a masterful depiction and analysis of a career we generally fail to understand, and which health care corporations have clearly failed to come to terms with. In this country, nurses do much of the work done by doctors in some countries. They are constantly observing and diagnosing. They often speak in terms that give doctors credit for their work, but if nurses always waited for doctors to analyze the raw data they collect, many lives would be lost. Entering a hospital that really functioned like that would carry a greater risk to patients than entering a war zone.

How ever skilled your doctor may be, a stay in a hospital without nurses competent in the fields relevant to your illness means a serious risk to your health. So does a stay in a hospital in which doctors will not condescend to listen to nurses. The stories Gordon tells of nurses' warnings being ignored, and needless deaths resulting, are heartbreaking and frustrating. Surely we should be beyond such petty egotism and class distinctions in a profession as long established as health care. Apparently we are not. Gordon devotes much of the first 150 pages of her book to the dysfunctional relationships in our hospitals.

Gordon encourages nurses to play a more outspoken role in the public debate over single-payer and other health care questions. But this book is not just for nurses. Every profession should have a book like this one. And every one of us should read each of those books. Working class solidarity is built by understanding the work our brothers and sisters do, and this book is a wonderful contribution toward that end.

http://www.counterpunch.org/swanson03142005.html