Life Support Three Nurses On The Front Line

Book Review: Life Support: Three Nurses on the Front Line

Life Support: Three Nurses on the Front Line, written by Suzanne Gordon, shows a considerable amount of points that are backed up with statistics and arguments about the deterioration in nursing care. Suzanne Gordon has been awarded for her outstanding journalist and author skills. Gordon broadly writes about health care in the medical field. Gordon goes through great measures to show how the health care system impacts each and every individual and their families and what they go through to do it. Gordon has many arguments throughout the book, but I will only analyze and evaluate three of the arguments made: medical profession neglecting the importance of physician-nurse relationships, the discipline between medicine and nurse, and the public and health policy issues.

During the time when all nurses were undervalued, Gordon followed and observed three registered nurses every day at Boston’s Beth Israel Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts, while on their daily routines for almost two years. Each of the nurses have different jobs, which cause them to have different roles. The three nurses Gordon evaluated were: Nancy Rumplik, an oncology nurse; Ellen Kitchen, a home care nurse practitioner; and Jeannie Chaisson, a clinical nurse specialist. All three nurses together have more than 50 years of work experiences in the medical field. Gordon gives us an assortment of cases the nurse worked on. She shows how each nurse has special abilities when it comes to helping their patients.

Gordon makes a great argument about doctor and nurse relationship. She states that in fact “many doctors still consider nurses to be their handmaidens,” although they are supposed to work together as a te...

... middle of paper ...

...ses are accused of not respecting the physician, but in fact they are only trying to help physicians understand their patient’s issues. On the other hand, physicians need to stop treating the nurses as if they were handmaids. Medicine and nursing may both improve the patient’s health, but are still considered to be two different disciplines. More people need to be better informed about the health policy and nursing care. All these arguments made by Gordon are well backed up with statistics and are similar to other arguments made by different bioethicists.

Being that I am a nursing major, I found this book to have a great amount of importance to it. I learned many things about the nursing that I did not know before reading the book. I would recommend this book to everyone who’s considering pursuing a career in nursing and to those who are already working as a nurse.