The Perfect Storm: Nursing In Twenty-First-Century America

The Perfect Storm: Nursing In Twenty-First-Century America Nursing against the Odds: How Health Care Cost Cutting, Media Stereotypes, and Medical Hubris Undermine Nurses and Patient Care by Suzanne Gordon (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2005), 512 pp., $29.95 Numerous authors have chronicled the U.S. nurse shortage in recent years. The effect of understaffing on inpatient mortality has been well documented empirically. Research and statistical analyses provide us with the breadth and magnitude of the factors contributing to the nurse shortage and its consequences. Suzanne Gordon puts a human face on the numerous facets of this problem. Her narrative makes the issue come alive through her thorough literature review, personal interviews, and life experiences as a health care journalist. She reports that the nursing profession is having difficulty attracting and retaining people because of the poor state of physician-nurse relationships, demeaning media stereotypes, and hospitals’ cost-cutting strategies. These three factors have intensified to such an extent in recent years that the resultant pressures create the coming "perfect storm" of a nurse shortage. The author suggests that the problematic nature of the physician-nurse relationship begins during the education of physicians. Early in their training, physicians learn as much as they can from nurses because nurses have more clinical knowledge. As young physicians advance in their program, they often feel that they no longer can learn from nurses because nurses are not perceived as having as much knowledge as physicians have. Physicians do not appreciate the fact that although they may have more...